Gloria Steinem told us where her feminism came from

Gloria Steinem spent 18 months in India in 1957 and 1958 that set the trajectory for the rest of her life. She credited those pivotal months with teaching her to listen, to organize from the ground up, and to understand “radical” as going to the root of a problem rather than to its extreme. In 2007, she told two Indian interviewers, “If you want people to listen, you have to listen to them. I believe I learned that in India.”

Her connection to India began long before she got there. Her mother and paternal grandmother were Theosophists, or followers of a spiritual movement that borrowed from Hindu and Buddhist thought and treated India as the home of ancient wisdom. While a student at Smith College in the 1950s, Steinem studied with Vera Micheles Dean, a foreign policy scholar who wrote about India and was publicly accused of communist sympathies in 1954. During her junior year in Geneva in 1954-1955, she wrote a research paper on why the Communist Party of India had never become the country’s dominant party.

Then she got engaged, and she did not want to be. “Marriage meant the end of life to me,” she said years later. The Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship in India in 1956, the year she graduated from Smith, saved her from the marriage.

Smith students had spent years raising money to send graduating seniors to India as unofficial goodwill ambassadors to a country that had declared itself nonaligned in the Cold War. Chester Bowles, the former U.S. ambassador to India, gave a lecture and waived his fee; the money it raised went into two $1,000 scholarships the students named after him, each less than half what they estimated a fellow would need to live on. They sent two students anyway. Steinem was one.

She landed in Bombay in February 1957 expecting one country and finding another. A tall, turbaned man stooped into the plane and turned toward her. “I rose, sure that he was going to begin a speech of ‘Welcome to India, mystic heart of Asia, land of ancient cultures.’ He namasthed politely before me” — greeted her with palms pressed together — “took out a shiny red insecticide bomb, and said, ‘Stand still while I spray you.’” India, she wrote in her fellowship reports, “shatters Western romantic illusions with little ceremony.”

She was initially tasked with explaining American culture and excellence to Indian students. However, at Miranda House, a women’s college at Delhi University, her classmates ended up asking her to explain American politics instead. In one class, she reported, “we were asked the difference between the U.S. interference in Guatemala and the Soviet action in Hungary” — the CIA-backed coup of 1954 and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. It “nearly shocked us into silence,” she wrote.

After the semester, when she could have gone home like most of the students around her, she chose to stay. She went first to the Himalayan foothills, to a study camp run by followers of M. N. Roy, an Indian former communist who had broken with Moscow. That is where she absorbed the idea that “radical” means going to the root of a problem, not to its extreme.

In the fall of 1957 she traveled south, to the ashram of Vinoba Bhave, a disciple of Gandhi who walked from village to village asking landowners to give land to the landless — and she found it nearly empty. Caste riots had broken out in Ramnad, a rural district in what was then Madras State, after the murder of a Dalit leader. The government had sealed the district and barred reporters. Teams from the ashram had walked around the roadblocks anyway.

She joined a team because it was short a woman. For a week they walked between villages. At night people came out and sat around a kerosene lamp in circles of six or twenty or fifty and told what had happened to them — burnings, murders, rapes. The teams listened. Steinem later called it “the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”

She had no word for it at the time, but a decade later American feminists called it consciousness-raising, as they sat together and discussed their experiences in their everyday lives as women — soon coming to the conclusion that the challenges they faced were largely attributable to systemic inequalities.

Fifteen years after Ramnad, the first issue of Ms., the feminist magazine Steinem famously founded, had an eight-armed goddess on the cover holding a typewriter, a steering wheel, a frying pan. Steinem said the image “had come out of my Indian past.” The masthead listed everyone alphabetically. The editors met in a room she called “comfortable and shoe-less,” and set their own salaries around a table in a Chinese restaurant, with the highest capped at three times the lowest.

She showed up in India with every assumption a white American in the 1950s could have, then spent sixty years being corrected and saying so out loud. When she went back to India in the late 1970s, she met Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who had led Gandhi’s national women’s organization, and told her: “Well, of course, my dears. We taught him everything he knew.” Steinem repeated that story and others from her time in India for decades.

Here was a young woman whose assumptions were challenged, and who still wrote down her honest reflections. Steinem kept doing that her whole life — approaching new ideas, learning from her mistakes, adapting. For fifty years she acknowledged the global influences that shaped her, especially at home, in a country that mostly ignored them.

Rashida Shafiq is a historian of American foreign relations and women’s history. Her book manuscript, “The Method and the Machinery: Gloria Steinem, India, and the Cold War Making of American Feminism,” is in the works.

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