Date:09/02/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/02/09/stories/2007020902440200.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Face of feminism

Special CorrespondentSugandhi Ravindranathan

BANGALORE: There is an intelligent generation of women whose worldview has been shaped by Gloria Steinem, editor and co-founder of Ms., the first American magazine run by women. She was the face of feminism and helped shape the debate on women's rights.

The 73-year-old Steinem has been in the city for the last couple of days and on Friday she speaks at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Network of Women in India, at Mount Carmel College.

Appropriately, it was the women in Ms. Steinem's family who shaped her future. Her mother was a newspaperwoman and grandmother a leading suffragette. She endured poverty and had to look after her emotionally wrecked mother even before she graduated from Smith College and won a fellowship to study in India for two years.

This exposure to Third World conditions made her realise that what fellow Americans take for granted was unattainable to most of humanity. She went back to begin a career as a journalist.

Influential voice

By the end of the sixties, Ms. Steinem was an influential voice in feminism and, along with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan, formed the National Women's Political Caucus to motivate women to join politics.

Ms. magazine that was founded in 1972 lent her worldwide credibility, and she used it to give voice to feminist and New Left concerns. Ms. Steinhem, who has written several books redefining feminism and questioning marriage and motherhood, married David Bale, actor Christian Bale's father, in 2000.