Gloria: In Her Own Words

It gives me great pleasure to present to you, Gloria Steinem.

Are we going to win? Yes!

Gloria Steinem is one of those women who, once noticed, isn't easily forgotten.

We are made to feel that we are nothing unless we are standing beside a man.

Some women are becoming more militant.

And their organizations are grouped in a kind of federation

called Women's Liberation.

Go do the dishes! Go do the dishes! Go do the dishes!

Go do the dishes!

These women are not kidding. They are deadly serious.

What they are demanding, is a greater share in the political power of this nation.

Females are supposed to stay home, have kids and keep the house clean.

I like being treated as a lady.

I like having a man hold my coat, open the door for me.

All the little things that I think are important to a woman.

Sure, the women's libbers are sincere. The homosexuals are sincere.

But they want to change the supreme law of our land.

What we are talking about is a revolution and not a reform.

Gloria Steinem. She is the most visible symbol of the women's movement.

You understand it's not a role exchange.

We're not trying to do to men what men have done to us.

We're trying to humanize both roles.

Every generation has its own names.

More than a third of this march is women under 25 years old.

You know, people who empower other people.

Watch us vote! We are willing! Watch us vote!

Susan B. Anthony said, "Our job is not to make young women grateful.

It's to make them ungrateful,

so they keep going.

We're not going to stop.

A feminist is what the dictionary says, which is a person,

male or female, who believes in the full

social, economic, political

equality of of women and men. And I would say also acts on it.

When I first came to New York and tried to get an apartment,

I discovered that landlords felt single women were not financially responsible,

and if you could earn enough, you must be a hooker.

The first year I freelanced,

I spent a lot of time sleeping on the living room floors of my friends.

I think that back then

I mean, you know, I'd had

one sentence in my textbook somewhere in the past

that said women were given the vote.

I thought it was all finished, it was all won. And that if I was still

that if I was still having a lot of difficulty, it must be my personal fault.

Honey, when was the last time you baked a cake? Last week, dear.

When I was growing up, we thought that the position

of women was biologically dictated.

And so we didn't feel we had the right

to be equal or to be angry.

It was the '50's,

and the women in college were still being educated to be mothers,

and the wives of executives, and so on.

And we were not learning about

anything that had to do with women's own status in society.

As a journalist,

I wanted to write about what I was interested in and that was politics.

But, there weren't so many women who were political reporters then.

Pretty few, really.

I wrote some unsigned pieces,

"What to do on dates in New York" and "How to cook without really cooking for men".

I mean, you know, all kinds of frivolous, but funny things.

And then I did this bunny assignment.

My name is Hugh Hefner and I'm editor and publisher of Playboy Magazine.

I worked as a Playboy Bunny in order to write an expose

of what the working conditions were.

I started with a personal investment of 600 dollars.

In eight years, I've built an empire worth 20 million.

It was being presented

as a glamorous place.

It was not the glamorous place that Hugh Hefner was trying to sell it as.

You were a Bunny girl for a while. An undercover Bunny girl.

Yeah. Yeah. To write a story. I changed my name and, uh,

went to, I thought I would get through, you know, a few auditions

and write about the auditions. But they were so desperate for people

that it kept going on and on. And I ended up working off and on for about a month.

I read all the ads, you know,

that you were supposed to get $300 a week and it was this,

you know, wonderful job.

I was hired but I had to go through the training course, which is at your own expense.

Reverse! Oh! Here we go! Fast! Fast!

Okay! Now we're gonna try a real high carry! Okay? There we go, whoah!

It was horrible.

There was nothing fun about it. It's really hard work. You know, you're carrying trays,

you have 3 inch high heels on.

You're paid very little, the trays are heavy, your feet hurt.

I learned what it's like to be hung on a meat hook.

I mean, that's essentially the emotional experience of walking around in a costume

that's so tight it would give a man a cleavage.

The response to the article was amazing, because the club was new then,

and it was kind of blowing the whistle on the glamour of the club.

I regretted for many years having done it because

he had made me unserious.

But as feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life,

I became glad I did it.

I didn't exactly, consciously know that I didn't want to get married.

I just knew I didn't want to get married, right then.

Have you ever been married? No. Uh-uh.

That's all. Yeah. Well, next question. Why not?

Is that your next question? Yep.

Uh, I don't know. Do you want to be?

Eventually. But it keeps receding two years in the comfortable distance.

You think about it a lot, though?

Uhm, yeah. I think so. I think you imagine what it would be like

to be married to people you're going out with, or people you meet.

Even if it's only for a second. Think about it.

Don't you think about it? No.

You don't? Well, maybe it's the lady's thing. I don't know.

People ask me why I'm not married. I just say, "I can't mate in captivity."

I somehow, totally related

to the character in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Please darling, don't sit there looking at me like that.

I love you, you belong to me. No.

People don't belong to people. Of course they do.

I'm not going to let anyone put me in a cage.

I really identified with Holly Golightly.

The streaked hair I can directly attribute to Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The aviator glasses were more about hiding.

The bigger they were, the more I felt I could hide behind them.

I came to New York, you know, full of idealism,

and wanting to write serious assignments, but

as a freelance writer, I was assigned, uhm,

things about fashion and food and

makeup and babies.

Or the low point of my life, writing about textured stockings.

When I delivered a piece to my editor at the Sunday Times Magazine,

he generally gave me a choice, like

either I could go to a hotel room with him in the afternoon,

or mail his letters on the way out.

There was no word for sexual harassment.

It was just called life, so you had to find your own individual way around it.

At a certain point in my 30's,

I discovered that other women were saying this kind of thing, too.

And the women's movement was just beginning. And I finally knew that I wasn't alone.

You know, that I wasn't crazy, the system was crazy.

The idea that I had a glamorous life

came in part, at least, from the idea that if you were

a pretty girl, whatever that meant,

that you must be getting assignments for that reason.

Or if you were ever photographed at a party,

that was your whole persona.

You couldn't also be serious.

So it did drive me crazy, you know, to be viewed in that way.

On the sidewalks, out in the street,

Women Unite! On the sidewalks, out in the street!

Women Unite!

Women make up 51 percent of the nation's population.

Are they, in effect, an oppressed majority?

Feminist leaders charge widespread discrimination.

Discrimination that keeps a woman from having an abortion if she wants it.

I went as a journalist to cover a hearing at which women were

standing up and telling their abortion experiences.

Women are not going to sit quietly any longer. You are murdering us.

I had had an abortion when I first graduated from college.

I was 22, and

there was no women's movement then. There was no companionship.

So, I never told anybody.

Uh, alright, will you please sit down or be removed from the...

No we're not going to sit down.

Why don't you give us some solid answers to our questions?

And I listened to these women testify

about all that they had to go through.

As soon as a woman gets pregnant she's treated like a common criminal.

She can't get an abortion.

The injury, the danger, the infection, the sexual humiliation,

you know, to get an illegal abortion and I suddenly realized,

"Why is it a secret?" You know, if one in three women has needed an abortion

in her lifetime in this country, why is it a secret and why is it criminal

and why is it dangerous?

And that was the big click.

It transformed me, and I began to seek out

everything I could find, of what was then, the burgeoning women's movement.

When the women's movement started, I was the in-between person.

You know? I was neither the mother, nor the daughter. I was in between.

And, perhaps that was helpful.

What sort of a reaction have you encountered from men or from women,

women, since you've let it be known that you're active in the women's rights movement?

Well, it's interesting. It's sort of, it's extreme, I think in both directions.

I mean, I now

attract, at any kind of gathering,

men who are very hostile to this movement.

But the most, the most touching response is from women.

Because it's like, it's poured out all the frustrations and humiliations away.

You know, it's uh,

I, I don't think I'd ever felt part of a group before.

Today, throughout the land, there is a growing demand by some women

that society begin to treat them as men,

different from men, but equal to them.

Most of this restaurant in Chicago is open to women.

But a small part is set aside for men

for men who want to have a quick lunch by themselves.

The bars in the restaurants, which women have been breaking the barriers in,

are, to us, what the lunch counters were to the black movement.

That's very serious and important.

We don't want to be intimidated by signs that say "Men's Buffet."

How 'bout would you like a sign up there that said,

"Blacks Only" or "Whites Only"? It's the same principle, so we are,

women are persons. Women are people.

I have no intentions of taking the sign down or changing the sign.

If you can get a court order to take it down, fine.