For all those women who wailed "How could she do it?" when Gloria Steinem, the world's most famous feminist, began keeping company with demibillionaire real estate developer and aspiring journalist Mort Zuckerman in the late '80s, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Little, Brown; 377 pages; $22.95) will serve as belated explanation. She did it for the car.
This wasn't just any car she fell for but a warm, chauffeur-driven cocoon of transit dispatched by Zuckerman to meet her as she returned to La Guardia Airport late one night from yet another fund-raising trip, so exhausted that the auto's "sheltering presence loomed out of all proportion." There she was, approaching 50, a burned-out crusader for women's causes who had not had time in 20 years to unpack the boxes in her bare apartment. She was nearly eligible for a senior citizen's discount before she bought her first sofa. Despite her confident demeanor, she felt so plain she wondered who that attractive, articulate woman impersonating her on television was. Thin as a pinstripe, she nonetheless felt one Sara Lee cheesecake away from Weight Watchers. Once a lively writer who impersonated a Playboy Bunny to expose Hugh Hefner's cheesy idea of sex appeal and quipped that if men could menstruate they would brag about how long and how much, she had produced very little since her collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, in 1983. Ms., the magazine she co-founded in 1972 and edited from crisis to crisis ever since, was spinning out of her control.
What was worse, the younger generation winced at the word feminism, while those who had never supported the idea were blaming it for everything from male impotence to global warming. By the time she sank into the soft leather interior of the car that night at La Guardia, she was insecure as a junk bond, without energy, without hope and without enough self-esteem to resist this inappropriate but eager suitor. "This relationship," she writes, "became a final clue that I was really lost."
By the time she is back to hailing cabs for herself several years later, she is well into her search for her lost self and a 12-point recovery program that includes imagery, hypnosis, meditation, unlearning, relearning and the Universal "I." She traces her loss of self to the day her 300-lb. father, an itinerant salesman, abandoned her when she was 10 in a rat-infested, dilapidated farmhouse fronting on a major highway in Toledo. Left to care for a loving but mentally ill mother who heard voices, she was forced to grow up too soon, to be mother to her mother. She escaped to Smith College but never escaped the trap of being the caretaker. Once she became involved in the movement, there was no campus, community group or benefit so small that she wouldn't hop on a plane and raise money for it. At times it seemed as if she had taken personal responsibility for every oppressed woman in America.
It is not surprising that this loss of childhood would catch up with her and that at fortysomething a parent substitute would come along in the guise of a knight in shining sedan, "someone," she writes, "I couldn't take care of." Overscheduled women everywhere will recognize themselves in her surrender to a decision-free zone of well-appointed houses and someone to clean them. "I found this very restful," she writes of the period. "I was just so . . . tired."