Finally Real

By Gloria Steinem As told to Francine Russo

I was about 35 when the women's movement got under way. Up to then I'd been a free-lance writer, rebelling secretly but hoping no one would notice. Even after feminism began, I thought the movement was just something I would do for a couple of years--to help get things started, like Ms. magazine, the National Women's Political Caucus--and then I would go back to my real life. I was still imagining that my real life hadn't happened yet when my 50th birthday came along in 1984. My friends asked to make it into a gala benefit for Ms. magazine and the Ms. Foundation for Women. I thought, Why not? When I die, my funeral will be a benefit too.

It was an amazing party at the Waldorf Astoria. Marlo Thomas and everybody at Ms. had organized everything from photos of all 50 years; to Phil Donohue, who toured the table with a microphone for toasts; to Bette Midler, who sang; to an all-woman orchestra. The guests were divided between people who were always at the Waldorf and people who'd never dreamed of going there. Rosa Parks came, Bella Abzug, Dolores Huerta for the farm workers and many movement people.

When it was my turn to speak, I stood on the stage looking at this sea of people who were from all the different parts of my life. Suddenly, I realized this was my life. It was an epiphany. I wasn't temporary anymore.

I think a lot of us feel we're waiting for life to happen, for something to make us into real adults. That's because our lives don't fit the lives we were supposed to have. As a 1950s person, I was supposed to get married and lead my husband's life, have children and later hold a regular job. I didn't want to do any of those things, but there was no alternative vision. What does adulthood look like if it doesn't look like what they told you?

Well, what it looked like was that room. My family was there, my chosen family. What I'd considered temporary was really permanent. I had tears in my eyes--me, the Midwesterner who, friends say, doesn't show feelings.

There was every emotion that night, including laughter. Bette Midler, who's always making fun of our obsession with breasts, literally sent up breasts--huge balloons painted to look like breasts that floated out from the stage. When I saw one of them floating past the head of Rosa Parks, I thought, "All the parts of my life really have come together!"

A few years later, when I had a brush with breast cancer, I heard the diagnosis and I thought, almost involuntarily, "I've had a wonderful life." It wasn't resignation, because I fought like crazy for the best and most conservative treatment, and haven't had a recurrence for 15 years. But it was another realization that this was my life, and it led me to make other changes. For decades, I'd been treating my apartment like a closet plus an office. It was stacked with cardboard boxes full of papers. Now I thought, "My life is not temporary; this is my home." I fixed it up. I bought lamps. I bought antique embroidered sheets.

My new outlook led me to spend the next couple of years writing Revolution from Within, which was published in 1992. Other books seemed to choose between external and internal, but I wanted to say that without internal authority, we can't keep challenging external authority. It has to be a balance.

This kind of long personal change--along with 30 years of legal changes that mean marriage doesn't take away a woman's civil rights anymore--made it possible for me to marry David Bale last year, when I was 66. Neither of us thought we wanted to get married, but because we both already had strong paths, we could discover how similar they were. David is the first person who has been with me in all the disparate parts of my life--one minute on a student bus political campaigning, the next at an elegant fund raiser.

All these years, I felt I was the only link between many different worlds. Now if I looked at that sea of faces at the Waldorf, there would be another person looking at the room with me--and understanding.

--As told to Francine Russo