My life on the road

Review by New York Times Review

FOR MANY PUBLIC intellectuals these days, speaking engagements pay the bills. But listening, according to the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, is even more important. Her new book, "My Life on the Road," provides a lesson in how to stay relevant when your name is synonymous with a decades-old movement that has fallen in and out of popular favor: Keep moving. And keep asking questions. Steinem calls herself a "wandering organizer," and she explains how a life of travel has boosted her spirits, shaped her politics and made her a household name. From her earliest days speaking on college campuses with her collaborators Florynce Kennedy and Margaret Sloan, to her work as a journalist on assignment for New York magazine, to her role drawing crowds to campaign events - it's easy to understand how the political change Steinem has witnessed and fostered is directly proportional to how peripatetic her life has been. "I come by my road habits honestly," Steinem, whose father was an itinerant salesman, writes. She was raised in an era when women were still primarily associated with the hearth and home, but was drawn to a life of travel after two years touring India in her early 20s. Since then, she has spent more than half her life on the road. Steinem has gained wisdom from cabdrivers and fellow airplane passengers, and gotten story tips from strangers at rural diners and truck stops. The road signifies freedom in other ways, too. An outsider can often express things that local organizers or embattled professors or political staff members may not be able to say. Like a feminist Zelig, the 81-year-old Steinem seems to have been present at many of the most important political moments of the last five decades. She listened to Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 march on Washington, and a black woman standing next to her pointed out the dearth of black women organizers onstage with him. She stood in the White House speechwriter Ted Sorensen's office as John F. Kennedy bade him farewell, on his way to deliver a speech in Dallas in 1963. She's in California with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in 1968, in solidarity with the farmworkers' strike. She organizes the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977. She's being cheered on a Pennsylvania campaign stage with the vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. She's in Palm Beach, Fla., the day after the 2000 election, as voters demand a recount. "If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go," she advises. As an author, Steinem is best known for her essay collections published in the 1980s and 1990s. Though they all contain first-person anecdotes, none are as autobiographically comprehensive as "My Life on the Road." Steinem's life has been so remarkable that her memoir would have been fascinating even without a central theme, but her decision to use travel as a thematic thread was a smart one. While the book is far from a tell-all, Steinem offers a few juicy details. She discusses her beef with the prickly second-wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan. She describes sharing a cab with Saul Bellow and Gay Talese, who, according to Steinem, dismissed her as "a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer." And she is candid about her choice to support Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary. She made a pro-con list on a yellow legal pad, but in the end, it came down to personal connections: "If I were Obama, I would not feel personally betrayed by the lack of support from someone like me, a new ally. If I were Hillary Clinton, I might feel betrayed by a longtime supporter who left me for a new face." In her view, the contentious 2008 primary was falsely characterized by the media as a fight over race and gender. Steinem is as much a part of the media as she is a part of the movement, so this explanation rings a bit hollow - especially because Steinem wrote a controversial Op-Ed in The New York Times about the candidates in which she noted, "What worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex." Steinem, who has become used to being the target of right-wing protesters, was shocked when she drew the ire of her fellow feminists for creating a hierarchy of oppressions. That was not, she writes, her intention. But it was "definitely my fault." Steinem has spent her career as a hybrid journalist-activist, which means at one moment she's covering a campaign as a reporter, and the next she's onstage as a movement organizer. As she leaps from anecdote to anecdote, it can be hard to follow which role she is occupying at any given moment. The line must have been blurry for her, too, though she doesn't confess to feeling conflicted about it. Her writing style reflects this professional dualism. "My Life on the Road" includes the reported storytelling of a great magazine article, but several of its sections are organized in long bullet points, with pithy takeaways at the end that are ripe for quoting on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. By her own admission, she doesn't do much listening or talking online. She writes that abolitionists and suffragists "couldn't rely only on letters, newspapers and books to spread the word, just as we must not rely only on television, email, Skype and Twitter." Throughout the book, she calls for in-person politics and face-to-face organizing. She extols the virtues of conversation circles in arousing empathy and creating connections, but insists that such breakthroughs are simply not possible online. "The miraculous and impersonal Internet is not enough," she writes. YET SHE FAILS to acknowledge that the in-person connections she values most are not always accessible to us all. Sure, we can engage in conversations with people in our local communities. But Steinem's most memorable gatherings have drawn together farflung women, across racial and state lines, to share their personal experiences and find common ground. Most of us don't have the time or money to crisscross the globe in search of meaningful feminist dialogue. And so we do the next best thing: We talk to one another online. If politics are, as Steinem writes, part of daily life, the Internet is one place where those politics play out. It seems foolish to play down its potential. Although Steinem beautifully illustrates how her perpetual motion has shaped her professional life, there's almost no mention of how it has affected her personally. She tells a few stories that involve men she's dated, like a rich guy with whom she flew to Palm Springs, and a nonwhite lover from the late '60s, with whom she was verbally attacked by a carful of white teenagers. She was married from 2000 to 2003, when her husband, David Bale, died of cancer, but his name does not appear in her book. She does, however, devote several pages to her friendship with the Native American feminist activist Wilma Mankiller, and to Mankiller's death and legacy. One gets the impression that Steinem's lifelong ties with other women and activists - not her romantic entanglements - are the defining relationships of her life, though she never comes out and says so. In her afterword, Steinem reveals that in recent years, she "had to admit that I too was leading an out-of-balance life." She has become interested in nesting as much as traveling. This ending strikes an odd chord. She assures readers that we don't have to give up the journey in order to have a home, and vice versa. But she does little to explain how or why she finally sought to strike this balance herself, and how much it has to do with her getting older. Perhaps this is the subject of her next book. 'If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go,' she advises. ANN FRIEDMAN writes a column about politics, culture and gender for New York magazine's website, and has contributed to Newsweek, The New Republic, Elle and other publications.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 15, 2015]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"If you want people to listen to you," iconic women's rights activist Steinem underscores in this powerfully personal yet universally appealing memoir, "you have to listen to them." And that's exactly what she's done for the past four decades, crisscrossing the country in search of inspiring women and women-and men-to inspire. Steinemn, a staunch advocate for reproductive rights and equal rights for women, long before either was fashionable in the public eye, writes candidly for the first time about her itinerant childhood spent with a father who itched to be constantly in motion and mother who gave up her own happiness for the sake of others. Vowing to distance herself from both her mother's dependent lifestyle and her father's peripatetic ways, Steinem ended up doing exactly what she never imagined: being a public speaker who's constantly on the move. Highlights include her role in the 1977 National Women's Conference-"It was my first glimpse of how little I knew-and how much I wanted to learn"-and her accounts of conversations with taxi drivers across the country. Throughout her travels, whether visiting small college campuses in the South or attending a 1971 Harvard Law School dinner where her equality speech was met with animosity, Steinem strives to create positive, meaningful change. Her inviting prose as easy and enjoyable to read, even when the subject matter veers towards the painful. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Steinem (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions) weaves an inspired personal narrative by sharing stories of the places she's seen and people who have galvanized her, which includes everyone from poet laureates to cab drivers; and how their influence transformed a young journalist with a palpable fear of public speaking to the face of the modern women's movement. The author doesn't shy away from her flaws and doubts, and her anecdotes-specifically those about her nomadic, cheerful, and kind-hearted father-are deeply moving. What's touching about this work is its hopefulness. Anger sparks activism, but optimism fuels it. (If you don't believe things can be better tomorrow, why would you fight today?) Steinem's confidence and faith-in people, ideas, and change-make this more than a collection of retold events; it tells how people can be encouraged in unexpected ways, in surprising places, with only one caveat: you have to be listening. VERDICT Poignant, accessible, essential. Activism is a people's movement, and this is a people's memoir. Ideal for readers who are familiar with Steinem's work as well as those who aren't. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/15.]-Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A respected feminist activist's memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer. Until she was 10 years old, Steinem (Moving Beyond Words, 1993, etc.) grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settlefor a brief time until collegeinto "the most conventional life" she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father's lonely way of traveling "wasn't the only one." Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in "talking circles" to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women's rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, "[c]aring for a home is caring for one's self." Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman's exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities. An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women's rights. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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I. My Father's Footsteps I come by my road habits honestly. There were only a few months each year when my father seemed content with a house-dwelling life. Every summer, we stayed in the small house he had built across the road from a lake in rural Michigan, where he ran a dance pavilion on a pier over the water. Though there was no ocean within hundreds of miles, he had named it Ocean Beach Pier, and given it the grandiose slogan "Dancing Over the Water and Under the Stars." On weeknights, people came from nearby farms and summer cottages to dance to a jukebox. My father dreamed up such attractions as a living chess game, inspired by his own love of chess, with costumed teenagers moving across the squares of the dance floor. On weekends, he booked the big dance bands of the 1930s and 1940s into this remote spot. People might come from as far away as Toledo or Detroit to dance to this live music on warm moonlit nights. Of course, paying the likes of Guy Lombardo or Duke Ellington or the Andrews Sisters meant that one rainy weekend could wipe out a whole summer's profits, so there was always a sense of gambling. I think my father loved that, too. But as soon as Labor Day had ended this precarious livelihood, my father moved his office into his car. In the first warm weeks of autumn, we drove to nearby country auctions, where he searched for antiques amid the household goods and farm tools. After my mother, with her better eye for antiques and her reference books, appraised them for sale, we got into the car again to sell them to roadside antique dealers anywhere within a day's journey. I say "we" because from the age of four or so, I came into my own as the wrapper and unwrapper of china and other small items that we cushioned in newspaper and carried in cardboard boxes over country roads. Each of us had a role in the family economic unit, including my sister, nine years older than I, who in the summer sold popcorn from a professional stand my father bought her. But once the first frost turned the lake to crystal and the air above it to steam, my father began collecting road maps from gas stations, testing the trailer hitch on our car, and talking about such faraway pleasures as thin sugary pralines from Georgia, all-you-can-drink orange juice from roadside stands in Florida, or slabs of salmon fresh from a California smokehouse. Then one day, as if struck by a sudden whim rather than a lifelong wanderlust, he announced that it was time to put the family dog and other essentials into the house trailer that was always parked in our yard, and begin our long trek to Florida or California. Sometimes this leave-taking happened so quickly that we packed more frying pans than plates, or left a kitchen full of dirty dishes and half-eaten food to greet us like Pompeii on our return. My father's decision always seemed to come as a surprise, even though his fear of the siren song of home was so great that he refused to put heating or hot water into our small house. If the air of early autumn grew too chilly for us to bathe in the lake, we heated water on a potbellied stove and took turns bathing in a big washtub next to the fireplace. Since this required the chopping of wood, an insult to my father's sybaritic soul, he had invented a wood-burning system all his own: he stuck one end of a long log into the fire and let the other protrude into the living room, then kicked it into the fireplace until the whole thing turned to ash. Even a pile of cut firewood in the yard must have seemed to him a dangerous invitation to stay in one place. After he turned his face to the wind, my father did not like to hesitate. Only once do I remember him turning back, and even then my mother had to argue strenuously that the iron might be burning its way through the ironing board. He would buy us a new radio, new shoes, almost anything rather than retrace the road already traveled. At the time, I didn't question this spontaneity. It was part of the family ritual. Now I wonder if seasonal signals might be programmed into the human brain. After all, we've been a migratory species for nearly all our time on earth, and the idea of a settled life is very new. If birds will abandon their young rather than miss the moment to begin a flight of thousands of miles, what migratory signals might our own cells still hold? Perhaps my father--and even my mother, though she paid a far higher price for our wanderings--had chosen a life in which those signals could still be heard. My parents also lived off the land--in their own way. We never started out with enough money to reach our destination, not even close. Instead, we took a few boxes of china, silver, and other small antiques from those country auctions, and used them to prime the process of buying, selling, and bartering our way along the southern route to California, or still farther south to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. It was a pattern that had begun years before I was born, and my father knew every roadside dealer in antiques along the way, as a desert traveler knows each oasis. Still, some shops were always new or under new management, and it must have taken courage to drive up in our dusty car and trailer, knowing that we looked less like antique dealers than like migrants forced to sell the family heritage. If a shop owner treated us with too much disdain, my father was not above letting him think we really were selling our possessions. Then he would regain his dignity by elaborating on his triumph once he was back in the car. Since my parents believed that travel was an education in itself, I didn't go to school. My teenage sister enrolled in whatever high school was near our destination, but I was young enough to get away with only my love of comic books, horse stories, and Louisa May Alcott. Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, "But I just looked an hour ago!" Indeed, it was road signs that taught me to read in the first place--perfect primers, when you think about it. coffee came with a steaming cup, hot dogs and hamburgers had illustrations, a bed symbolized hotel, and graphics warned of bridge or road work. There was also the magic of rhyming. A shaving cream company had placed small signs at intervals along the highway, and it was anticipating the rhyme that kept me reading: If you don't know whose signs these are you can't have driven very far. Burma Shave Later, when I read that Isak Dinesen recited English poems to her Kikuyu workers in Kenya--and they requested them over and over again, even though they didn't understand the words--I knew exactly what they meant. Rhyming in itself is magic. In this way, we progressed through rain and sandstorms, heat waves and cold winds, one small part of a migration of American nomads. We ate in diners where I developed a lifetime ambition to run one with blue gingham curtains and bran muffins. In the car during the day, we listened to radio serials, and at night, to my father singing popular songs to stay awake. I remember driving into the pungent smell of gas stations, where men in overalls emerged from under cars, wiping their hands on greasy rags and ushering us into a mysterious and masculine world. Inside were restrooms that were not for the queasy or faint of heart. Outside were ice chests from whose watery depths my father would pluck a Coke, drink it down in one amazing gulp, and then search for a bottle of my beloved Nehi Grape Soda so I could sip it slowly until my tongue turned purple. The attendants themselves were men of few words, yet they gave freely of their knowledge of the road and the weather, charging only for the gas they sold. I think of them now as tribesmen along a trading route, or suppliers of caravans where the Niger enters the Sahara, or sailmakers serving the spice ships of Trivandrum. And I wonder: Were they content with their role, or was this as close to a traveling life as they could come? I remember my father driving on desert roads made of wired-together planks, with only an occasional rattlesnake ranch or one-pump gas station to break the monotony. We stopped at ghost towns that had been emptied of every living soul, and saw sand dunes pushing against lurching buildings, sometimes shifting to reveal a brass post office box or other treasure. I placed my hands on weathered boards, trying to imagine the people they once had sheltered, while my parents followed the more reliable route of asking the locals. One town had died slowly after the first asphalt road was laid too far away. Another was emptied by fear when a series of mysterious murders were traced to the sheriff. A third was being repopulated as a stage set for a western movie starring Gary Cooper, with sagging buildings soaked in kerosene to make an impressive fire, and signs placed everywhere to warn bystanders away. Ever challenged by rules, my father took us down the road to a slack place in the fence, and sneaked us onto the set. Perhaps assuming that we had permission from higher-ups, the crew treated us with deference. I still have a photo my father took of me standing a few feet from Gary Cooper, who is looking down at me with amusement, my head at about the height of his knee, my worried gaze fixed on the ground. As a child who wanted too much to fit in, I worried that we would be abandoned like those towns one day, or that my father's rule-breaking would bring down some nameless punishment. But now I wonder: Without those ghost towns that live in my imagination longer than any inhabited place, would I have known that mystery leaves a space for us when certainty does not? And would I have dared to challenge rules later in life if my father had obeyed them? Whenever we were flush, we traded the cold concrete showers of trailer parks for taking turns at a hot bath in a motel. Afterward, we often went to some local movie palace, a grand and balconied place that was nothing like the warrens of viewing rooms today. My father was always sure that a movie and a malted could cure anything--and he wasn't wrong. We would cross the sidewalk that sparkled with mica, enter the gilded lobby with fountains where moviegoers threw pennies for luck and future return, and leave our cares behind. In that huge dark space filled with strangers, all facing huge and glowing images, we gave ourselves up to another world. Now I know that both the palaces and the movies were fantasies created by Hollywood in the Depression, the only adventures most people could afford. I think of them again whenever I see subway riders lost in paperback mysteries, the kind that Stephen King's waitress mother once called her "cheap sweet vacations"--and so he writes them for her still. I think of them when I see children cramming all five senses into virtual images online, or when I pass a house topped by a satellite dish almost as big as it is, as if the most important thing were the ability to escape. The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our "need for distraction, our mania for the new."1 In many languages, even the word for human being is "one who goes on migrations." Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey. Most of all from my childhood travels, I remember the first breath of salt air as we neared our destination. On a California highway overlooking the Pacific or a Florida causeway that cut through the Gulf of Mexico like Moses parting the Red Sea, we would get out of our cramped car, stretch, and fill our lungs in an ontogeny of birth. Melville once said that every path leads to the sea, the source of all life. That conveys the fatefulness of it--but not the joy. Years later, I saw a movie about a prostituted woman in Paris who saves money to take her young daughter on a vacation by the sea. As their train full of workers rounds a cliff, the shining limitless waters spread out beneath them--and suddenly all the passengers begin to laugh, throw open the windows, and toss out cigarettes, coins, lipstick: everything they thought they needed a moment before. This was the joy I felt as a wandering child. Whenever the road presents me with its greatest gift--a moment of unity with everything around me--I still do. Another truth of my early wanderings is harder to admit: I longed for a home. It wasn't a specific place but a mythical neat house with conventional parents, a school I could walk to, and friends who lived nearby. My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever. I never stopped to think that children in neat houses and conventional schools might envy me. When I was ten or so, my parents separated. My sister was devastated, but I had never understood why two such different people were married in the first place. My mother often worried her way into depression, and my father's habit of mortgaging the house, or otherwise going into debt without telling her, didn't help. Also, wartime gas rationing had forced Ocean Beach Pier to close, and my father was on the road nearly full time, buying and selling jewelry and small antiques to make a living. He felt he could no longer look after my sometimes-incapacitated mother. Also, she wanted to live near my sister, who was finishing college in Massachusetts, and now I was old enough to be her companion. We rented a house in a small town, and spent most of one school year there. It was the most conventional life we would ever lead. After my sister graduated and left for her first grown-up job, my mother and I moved to East Toledo and an ancient farmhouse where her family had once lived. As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun. What once had been countryside was crowded with the small houses of factory workers. Excerpted from My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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