My Life on the Road Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Gloria Steinem

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and The Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.: Excerpts from “In These Dissenting Times” from Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems by Alice Walker, copyright © 1970 and copyright renewed 1998 by Alice Walker. Electronic rights and rights throughout the U.K. and Commonwealth are controlled by The Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and The Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.

  Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC: Excerpt from “Rainy Night in Georgia” written by Tony White, copyright © 1969 Combine Music Corp. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinem, Gloria.

  My life on the road / Gloria Steinem.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-679-45620-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8835-2

  1. Steinem, Gloria. 2. Feminists—United States—Biography.

  3. Feminism—United States. I. Title.

  HQ1413.S675A3 2015

  305.42092—dc23

  [B]

  2015010718

  eBook ISBN 9780812988352

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title page photograph © Marianne Barcellona

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for eBook

  Cover design: Gregg Kulick

  Cover photograph: © Tom Victor

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Introduction: Road Signs

  I: My Father’s Footsteps

  II: Talking Circles

  III: Why I Don’t Drive

  IV: One Big Campus

  V: When the Political Is Personal

  VI: Surrealism in Everyday Life

  VII: What Once Was Can Be Again

  Afterword: Coming Home

  Dedication

  Notes of Gratitude

  Notes

  Other Titles

  About the Author

  “Evolution intended us to be travelers….Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been…a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time.”

  —Bruce Chatwin, ANATOMY OF RESTLESSNESS

  I board a plane for Rapid City, South Dakota, and see a lot of people in black leather, chains, and tattoos. Airline passengers usually look like where they’re going—business suits to Washington, D.C., jeans to L.A.—but I can’t imagine a convention of such unconventional visitors in Rapid City. It’s the kind of town where people still angle-park their cars in front of the movie palace. My bearded seatmate is asleep in his studded jacket and nose ring, so I just accept one more mystery of the road.

  At the airport, I meet five friends from different parts of the country. We are a diverse group of women—a Cherokee activist and her grown-up daughter, two African American writers and one musician, and me. We’ve been invited to a Lakota Sioux powwow celebrating the powerful place that women held before patriarchy arrived from Europe, and efforts now to restore that place.

  As we drive toward the Badlands, we see an acre of motorcycles around each isolated diner and motel. This solves the mystery of the leather and chains, but creates another. When we stop for coffee, our waitress can’t believe we don’t know. Every August since 1938, bikers from all over the world have come here for a rally named after Sturgis, a town that’s just a wide place in the road. They are drawn by this sparsely populated space of forests, mountains, and a grid of highways so straight that it is recognizable from outer space. Right now about 250,000 bikers are filling every motel and campground within five hundred miles.

  Our band of six strong women takes note. The truth is we are a little afraid of so many bikers in one place. How could we not be? We have all learned from movies that bikers travel in packs, treat their women like possessions, and may see other women as sexual fair game.

  But we don’t run into the bikers because we spend our days traveling down unmarked roads, past the last stand of trees, in Indian Country. We eat home-cooked food brought in trucks, sit on blankets around powwow grounds where dancers follow the heartbeat of drums, and watch Indian ponies as decorated as the dancers. When it rains, a rainbow stretches from can’t-see to can’t-see, and fields of wet sweet grass become as fragrant as gigantic flowers.

  Only when we return late each night to our cabins do we see motorcycles in the parking lot. While walking in Rapid City, I hear a biker say to his tattooed woman partner, “Honey, shop as long as you want—I’ll meet you at the cappuccino place.” I assume this is an aberration.

  On our last morning, I enter the lodge alone for an early breakfast, trying to remain both inconspicuous and open-minded. Still, I’m hyperconscious of a room full of knife sheaths, jackboots, and very few women. In the booth next to me, a man with chains around his muscles and a woman in leather pants and an improbable hairdo are taking note of my presence. Finally, the woman comes over to talk.

  “I just want to tell you,” she says cheerfully, “how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years—and my husband, too. He reads some now that he’s retired. But what I wanted to ask—isn’t one of the women you’re traveling with Alice Walker? I love her poetry.”

  It turns out that she and her husband have been coming to this motorcycle rally every year since they were first married. She loves the freedom of the road and also the mysterious moonscape of the Badlands. She urges me to walk there, but to follow the paths marked by ropes. During the war over the sacred Black Hills, she explains, Lakota warriors found refuge there because the cavalry got lost every time.

  Her husband stops by on his way to the cashier and suggests I see the huge statue of Crazy Horse that’s being dynamited out of the Black Hills. “Crazy Horse riding his pony,” he says, “is going to make all those Indian-killing presidents on Mount Rushmore look like nothing.” He walks away, a gentle, lumbering man, tattoos, chains, and all.

  Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot.

  “See that purple Harley out there—the big gorgeous one? That’s mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn’t have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attack and totaling us both. I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”

  On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I’ve walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.

  What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.

  I tell you this story because it’s the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I’ve come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.

  We have only to discover it—and ride.
r />   FROM GLORIA STEINEM’S PERSONAL COLLECTION

  WITH ALICE WALKER NEAR THE BADLANDS, 1994.

  Road Signs

  When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. For more than four decades, I’ve spent at least half my time on the road.

  I’ve never tried to write about this way of life, not even when I was reporting on people and events along the way. It just seemed to have no category. I wasn’t on a Kerouac road trip, or rebelling before settling down, or even traveling for one cause. At first I was a journalist following stories, then a sometime worker in political campaigns and movements, and most consistently an itinerant feminist organizer. I became a person whose friends and hopes were as spread out as my life. It just felt natural that the one common element in that life was the road.

  When friends or reporters assumed that spending so much time away from home was a hardship, I often asked them to travel with me, hoping they would get as hooked as I was. Yet in all these years, only one took me up on it—for just three days.1

  As decades passed, and the word still entered my life—as in “Oh, you’re still traveling”—it dawned on me that I’d been writing least about what I was doing most.

  So I sat down and began to make notes about many trips, past and present, that left me amazed by what is, angered by what isn’t, and hooked on what could be. As I looked through old date books and schedules, letters and abandoned journals, suddenly I was awash in a sense memory of my father going through his tattered road maps and address books, trying to figure out how much gas money he needed to get from here to there, where to find trailer parks that would shelter his wife and two daughters, and what roadside dealers might buy the small antiques which he sold and bartered as we made our way across the country. It was so vivid that I could sense our conspiratorial whispering as we tried not to wake my mother, who was asleep in this house trailer that was our home for most of each year.

  Until that moment, I would have sworn that I had rebelled against my father’s way of life. I created a home that I love and can retreat to, though he wanted no home at all. I’ve never borrowed a penny, though he was constantly in debt. I take planes and trains to group adventures, though he would spend a week driving cross-country alone rather than board a plane. Yet in the way that we rebel, only to find ourselves in the midst of the familiar, I realized there was a reason why the road felt like home. It had been exactly that for the evocative first decade of my life. I was my father’s daughter.

  I never imagined starting this book with my father’s life. Then I realized I had to.

  More discoveries followed. For instance, I always thought of my road life as temporary, assuming that one day I would grow up and settle down. Now I realized that for me, the road was permanent, and settling down was temporary. Traveling had created my nonroad life, not the other way around.

  Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn’t have to talk—and I had been both.

  Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the editors I’d been freelancing for were gigantically uninterested in the explosion of feminism across the country. I finally got angry enough and desperate enough to partner with a woman who was much braver than I, and to travel to campuses and community groups. Over time and far from home, I discovered something I might never otherwise have learned: people in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn’t possible on the page or screen.

  Gradually, I became the last thing on earth I would ever have imagined: a public speaker and a gatherer of groups. And this brought an even bigger reward: public listening. It was listening that taught me there would be readers for a national feminist magazine, no matter what publishing experts said.

  Up to then, I’d been a freelance writer who never wanted to work in an office or be responsible for anything other than my own rent. But because of what I learned on the road, I invited writers and editors to explore starting a feminist magazine that was devoted, in the words of the great Florynce Kennedy, “to making revolution, not just dinner.” When those women also said they had no place to publish what they cared about most, Ms. magazine was born.

  From then on, I came home to a magnetic office full of journalists and editors. Ms. gave me not only an added reason to go on the road, but a chosen family to return to after every trip, my pockets full of scribbled notes about new events.

  Altogether I might never have had the will or the way to do any of the things that matter most to me, had it not been for just being Out There.

  Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It’s right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present.

  —

  AS YOU CAN SEE, the first reason for this book is to share the most important, longest-running, yet least visible part of my life. It’s my chance to do more than come home saying to friends, “I met an amazing person who…,” or “Here’s a great new idea for…,” or, most of all, “We have to stop generalizing about ‘the American people,’ ” as if we were one homogeneous lump. I’m also now immune to politicians who say, “I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know…” I’ve traveled more than any of them, and I don’t know.

  What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don’t.

  Altogether, if I’d been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person—especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.

  On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality. For instance, Americans are supposed to cherish freedom, yet we imprison a bigger percentage of our people than any other country in the world. I talk to students who are graduating in crippling debt, yet don’t connect this to state legislatures that are building prisons we don’t need instead of schools we do need, and then spending an average of fifty thousand dollars a year per prisoner and way less per student. I love the entrepreneurial spirit of people who start a high-tech company or a hot dog stand, but our income and wealth gaps are the biggest in the developed world. I meet people in Indian Country who can trace their origins back a hundred thousand years, and survivors of sex and labor trafficking who arrived yesterday. Also, this country is transforming before our eyes. In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? But with all the power and money that is behind it, this backlash could imprison us in a hierarchy all over again.

  As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, “Hate generalizes, love specifies.”2 That’s what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.

  —

  MY SECOND PURPOSE IS to encourage you to spend some time on the road, too. By that, I mean traveling—or even living for a few days where you are—in an on-the-road state of mind, not seeking out the familiar but staying open to whatever comes along. It can begin the mom
ent you leave your door.

  Like a jazz musician improvising, or a surfer looking for a wave, or a bird riding a current of air, you’ll be rewarded by moments when everything comes together. Listen to the story of strangers meeting in a snowstorm that Judy Collins sings about in “The Blizzard,” or read Alice Walker’s essay “My Father’s Country Is the Poor.” Each starts in a personal place, takes an unpredictable path, and reaches a destination that is both surprising and inevitable—like the road itself.

  An addiction to the road can exist anywhere. The Sufi poet Rumi’s caravan wandered through a dozen Muslim lands; the Roma people left India for Europe and never settled down; and Australia’s aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders go on walkabout to renew ancient songlines. I am writing this on-the-road-in-America book because it’s the place I live and travel most, and most need to understand, especially given its outsize influence on the world. Also I’m not sure we can understand another country if we don’t understand our own. In my twenties, I had the good luck to live for a year in Europe, and then for two years in India—yet in some ways, I was escaping more than being fully present. Secure Europe was a momentary way of leaving an insecure childhood behind. Faraway India helped to introduce me to the way most people live in the world, something way beyond anything I knew. I’m still thankful to that huge and struggling country for being impossible to ignore; otherwise I might have come home as the same person I was when I left.

  My purpose here is to tempt you to explore this country. American travel seems to need an advocate. If I’m going to Australia or Zambia, people tell me how exciting it is, yet if I’m traveling anywhere in these United States, they sympathize and say how tiring it must be. In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.