My Life on the Road

We know about Gloria, we women. We know that she has been supporting us, urging us and demanding us to speak up for decades now. She has travelled the world to bring our stories to a global platform. She is a tireless, considered narrator of hope and kindness. Recognised and admired worldwide for her social activism in the field of women’s rights, Steinem’s opus has been to record observations that make sense of our shared experience as women. She has constantly been on the move (thus the imaginative title) and this book chronicles her travels from her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the founding of Ms Magazine to the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference. Showing tremendous irony, humour and vigour, Steinem reveals her childhood to her life, at age 81, now.

Her accounts are good-natured and often very funny. There are vignettes of people she has met, taxi drivers she has sat with, students she has argued with and media shock jocks she has talked with. She says, ‘We need to be long-distance runners to make a real social revolution. And you can’t be a long-distance runner unless you have some inner strength.’ She counsels us to look after ourselves, to remain alert to discrimination, and to heed other stories. For example, she talks about working with Hilary Clinton and the extraordinary means by which people showed their hatred for Clinton – until they met her.

This intimate and beautifully written book exemplifies her profound devotion to justice. She discloses her stories as if we all live by her rules of conduct. It was Steinem who pointed out, after all, that the personal is political and the political in turn is personal. My Life on the Road is inspiring and, hopefully, for all who read it, completely and utterly insidious. I want to be as impatient as Gloria; it gets things done.

Chris Gordon