Gloria Steinem Gets Married (It’s All About the Hypocrisy)

    Responding to an old article about Gloria Steinem (Steinem finds ‘truth’ behind Valentine’s Day love fools), Josh posted a comment the other day saying,

I just heard that Gloria Steinem … just got married. Apparently she doesn’t quite agree with you that romance is always “an unnatural idea created by patriarchal institutions to keep women in their place.

    First, I don’t happen to think marriage is “an unnatural idea created by patriarchal institutions.” That, in fact, was a summary of Steinem’s claims against marriage in her 1992 book, Revolution From Within, in which Steinem slammed romance and marriage as patriarchal constructs designed to keep women from engaging in revolutionary acts. Just read what she wrote:

Romance itself serves a larger political purpose by offering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threatening rebels with loneliness and rejection. … (Romance) also minimizes the very anti-patriarchal and revolutionary possibility that women and men will realize each other’s shared humanity when we are together physically for the sexual and procreative purposes society needs. … The Roman ‘bread and circuses’ way of keeping the masses happy – and the French saying that ‘marriage is the only adventure open to the middle class’ – might now be updated. The circus of romance distracts us with what is, from society’s point of view, a safe adventure.

    Comparing marriage to the spectacle of the Roman ‘bread and circuses’ presents a pretty stark case against marriage, as does the view that romance is a construct largely designed to be used as a threat to keep women from challenging gender roles.

    And now Steinem is getting married. What are we to make of this? This isn’t too difficult — like most ideologues, Steinem is a hypocrite (always has been). The whole thrust of the above chapter of Revolution From Within is that many women are making “inauthentic” choices. No woman (or man) would really choose a conventional marriage with all that it entails so there must be something forcing women into marriages. But of course those who consider themselves enlightened enough to point out that other people’s choices aren’t really legitimate rarely apply the same sort of logic to themselves.

    This is no different than pro-life individuals, such as Gary Bauer, who could go on all day about the evils of abortion but then stutter and fumble all over themselves when asked what they would do if their daughter wanted an abortion.

    What are we to make of Steinem’s marriage? If we take her claims in Revolution From Within seriously, she is making an inauthentic choice based on patriarchal browbeating. Personally I just hope she’s happy in her marriage and would repudiate her implication that women who want to get married are victims of patriarchal brainwashing.

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