I am blown away at the sight of her. The fabled American feminist Gloria Steinem is sitting right over there, perched on a red armchair, next to Gill Marcus and Pregs Govender. From my vantage point in the GIBS auditorium, she looks too good to be real, never mind 75.
She is dressed in New York black from head to boot heel. The glasses are gone, but the signature mane of streaky blonde hair still swings like the revolution Steinem led back in the day when men were Master and women were vacuum cleaners with cleavage.
Later in the evening, she punches the air and cries: ”This is what 75 looks like!”
I don’t know if Gloria Steinem ever actually burned a bra, but I do know that we would not be here now in the same way were it not for the woman who invented feminism. ”We chose the word feminism,” she explains to her rapturous audience, ”because even though I loved Women’s Liberation [one term back on the timeline], it excluded men.”
I could see exactly what Martin Amis meant when, in a 1984 interview, he described her with more than a hint of relief: ”Gloria Steinem is the most eloquent and persuasive feminist in America.
”She is also the most reassuring — ie. the least frightening, from a male point of view.”
And also from the point of view of many girls who grew up in the backwash of the Second Wave only to find that the hip face of feminism — Steinem, Germaine Greer — had been replaced by the grim-lipped Andrea Dworkin, who managed to make penetration sound like a medieval torture and appeared not to mind what humidity did to her hair.
Back to the fabulous: Steinem, the original women’s libber, was the headline attraction at the launch of the Wendy Appelbaum Foundation in Johannesburg on Tuesday evening.
Steinem was to deliver the inaugural lecture on ”Women and Power” — the informing idea behind the foundation. Appelbaum is a rising philanthropist who, besides being rich, is also disarmingly determined to put to work ”the enormous muscle of my whiteness and my family history”. Her father is the financial services and property tycoon Donald Gordon.
Appelbaum and Steinem clearly have a more meaningful relationship than ”find me a femi-celeb to launch my show”: they had just returned from visiting a project they’re doing together in Zambia which Steinem chatted about warmly, if vaguely (”sweat equity” was mentioned). Still, perhaps this is why Steinem felt, um, liberated, from delivering a lecture at all.
Instead, inspired by what she’d seen in Zambia, she went for the lekgotla model of under-the-tree communication.
In her calm, pleasantly low drawl, Steinem announced that she wouldn’t be speaking grandly or even much at all, but wanted us to ”really feel we’re sitting in a circle and learning from each other”.
This set the tone for the rest of the event and seemed to be a popular choice with the audience — itself an intriguing mix of big swinging chicks in business, media and politics, with a good dusting of society divas. Some of the white ones looked as though their suntans had been baked on back when nobody knew any better and all the best people slathered themselves in cooking oil, preferably on the island of Mustique. With Princess Margaret. It was hard to picture these exotic creatures meeting under a tree. Without SPF 60.
It wasn’t the substance so much as the style of Steinem’s talk that I found enjoyable. Indeed, the content was as slender as she is and strangely unmemorable: have faith in one another, feel the magic of meeting in groups, come away with one new subversive organising tactic …
The tone at times was kind of retro, even flaky, harking back to the days when revolutionaries and other oppressed people routinely consoled themselves by splitting into small groups.
Yet there is a lovely … lack of performer’s ego about Steinem. She is crisply articulate, warm yet cool, in control, not controlling.
For me just being in the same room as a woman whose actions have changed the world for the better was enough. Her lateral range of credentials — social, political, journalistic, intellectual — would be too long to print here. But you can Google her too.
Look for tags like: anti-war, anti-racism, children’s rights, Ms. magazine, Equal Rights Amendment, Playboy bunny … As a young magazine writer looking for a break, Steinem famously went undercover, cotton tail and all, to expose the conditions under which Hugh Hefner’s bunnies toiled in the Sixties.
Funny now, to think that Playboy and feminism were born of the same sexual revolution and that a woman with bunny girl looks would become the world’s pre-eminent feminist.
Steinem’s arsenal of qualities certainly includes a wry regard for life’s little ironies. As she joked in Johannesburg on Tuesday night, ”If women slept their way to power, there would be more women in power by now.”