Even Feminists Get the Blues

At 57, Gloria Steinem finally comes to terms with her childhood and realizes what she has been missing

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She mistook fatigue for love for only two years, but that was long enough to give rise to a rumor more virulent than the Asian flu that she was racing around Manhattan to fertility specialists trying to get pregnant. The sad truth is that she was consulting cancer doctors who saw her through breast surgery for a malignant tumor.

There were lots of reasons for the throw weight of the rumor. If true, it gave the lie to her belief that the single life was worth living, that a family consists of the people we are tied to by the work we share and < friendship as well as by blood. If false, it was still an excellent occasion for schadenfreude by those who suspected without proof that she was a cunning hypocrite and who, incidentally, resented the way she could blast men as a group for their piggishness but nevertheless attract a succession of highly appealing ones who adored her but didn't expect her to pick up their sweat socks.

When Steinem, now 57, pours a second cup of coffee and writes like she talks, there is no one more fascinating. The only comparable figure in public life is Ralph Nader, and he doesn't manage the trick of combining her monastic commitment with unapologetic glamour that gets her waved past the velvet ropes at clubs on both coasts. Strangers come up to her on the street and tell her, "You changed my life," and cleaning women at the airport find a place for her to take a nap.

But we get too few glimpses of this person in the book who, despite all the self-actualization, writes as if she believes that what Julie Andrews or Mahatma Gandhi or the Gnostic Gospels have to tell us is more worthwhile than what makes her tick. Fortunately, one of the world's most interesting women is incapable of writing an uninteresting book, even when she summarizes most of the extant literature on the inner child. A $700,000 advance can buy a lot of self-esteem. But if that's not enough, if only the women whose lives were touched by Steinem were to buy the book, it would be a best seller. Here, Gloria, is $22.95. Buck up, and thanks for everything.

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