Steinem:

By Joelle Attinger

Let's get one thing straight. Gloria Steinem, the leading icon of American feminism, has not turned her back on the women's movement. Quite the contrary. She has come of age with a 377-page credo on the potency of self-esteem that is rooted in nearly three decades of social activism, embraces men and women with equal fervor, and neatly hooks into the national quest for the self. With her No. 1 best seller, Revolution from Within, she has vaulted back into the public fray. "Maybe I should have done this earlier in my life," she says candidly, "but I was so tired, burned out and distant from myself that I couldn't."

From Seattle to Cambridge, Mass., women and men, young and old, flock to bookstores, libraries and auditoriums to hear her blender treatise on the inner child, unlearning, relearning, the "Universal I" and the five senses. "The bottom line is that self-authority is the single most radical idea there is," she says emphatically, "and there is a real hunger for putting the personal and the external back together again." Steinem is hardly the first to tap into that need, and indeed, her book (published by Little, Brown, a division of Time Warner) draws heavily, and at times mushily, from the existing literature. The public response defies a number of critics, many of them women, who have decried Steinem for "abandoning the cause" by subsuming feminism in a model for self-recovery and creating a harmful diversion from the feminist agenda. Nonsense, says writer Joan Murphy Lloyd. "We're talking about a conscious, quantum, evolutionary leap here. Feminism is part of that whole."

It is curious that after all these years ahead of the pack, Steinem appears surprised and a bit disquieted by the controversy her book has engendered. In one breath she talks about rewriting the introduction to clarify the book's thesis and convert her critics, and in the next she refuses to see herself as a leader. "I wrote out of my personal and political reality and never thought it would have this impact," she admits readily. Breaking down hierarchies has long been her mission, and at 57, she is clearly not about to create a new one. "The point is for people to empower themselves," she says firmly, "and this book is a form of consciousness-raisi ng."

For herself, above all. Steinem's lengthy quest for self-validation has loosened her personal reticence somewhat, but she still chafes at being viewed through that prism. Yes, she has finally furnished her Upper East Side brownstone with more than boxes, saved money for the first time in her life, taken up an exercise regimen, untangled her relationship with multimillionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, and learned to relax, but why should anyone care? Unless, of course, she decides it matters in the broader scheme of promoting self- actualization. More than a tinge of naivete colors this side of Steinem, whose struggle to balance her public and private lives has hardly been waged behind closed doors. Yet her sensitivity is not without cause. Many reviewers have given short shrift to or virtually ignored the political implications of her thesis in order to elaborate on the minimal amount of personal details she chooses to divulge. "All this concern about the private life of public figures simply allows people to typecast," she counters, "and it distracts from what is important."

But with ordinary readers, Steinem's message has broken through. They don't ask her about the personal much. They want to know about the self and how to gain and trust their own. It is a fine triumph for this woman, who has shaped so many lives by tacking her beliefs and efforts to the events of her time, to succeed in holding the feminist course while expanding its horizons to include everyone. "When one member of a group changes," Steinem writes, "the balance shifts for everyone, and when one group changes, it shifts the balance of society."