Gloria Steinem

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2016

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer, feminist & activist, Gloria Steinem.

At the forefront of the second wave of feminism, she came to prominence after publishing an article entitled "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" in 1969. Two years later she co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. As an activist, she has spent much of her life travelling, giving talks and lecturing.

Born in 1934 in Ohio, her father was a businessman who ran a lake-side resort in the summer and packed up his family at the first sign of frost to travel cross-country in a caravan selling antiques. Her mother had been a newspaper journalist and later suffered a nervous breakdown before Gloria was born. She became her mother's sole carer aged eleven when her parents divorced. It was only following their separation, having settled down in a house in Toledo, that she spent her first full year at school.

After high school, she read politics and government and then traveled around India for two years on a fellowship. On her return, she established herself as a writer in 1960s New York and co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. Since then, her writing has appeared in innumerable magazines, newspapers, anthologies, television commentaries, political campaigns, and film documentaries in America and internationally. In 2013 she was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest honour, by Barack Obama.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My castaway this week is the activist and writer Gloria Steinham, a world-renowned feminist
0:39.7	she has spent the past 45 years thinking, writing and talking about equality.
0:45.5	Her logic's unimpeachable, her books are bestsellers, her lecture tours packed out, and yet
0:51.6	the movement she's champion still has a pretty long to-do list
0:54.6	domestic violence the pay gap reproductive freedom it would seem that even now
0:59.8	feminism continues to be a work in progress.
1:03.0	Challenging convention isn't something she chose,
1:06.0	rather it was part of her very beginnings.
1:09.0	An itinerant childhood was
1:15.0	12,
1:20.0	12 before she was 12 before she completed a full year in school.
1:22.0	She says, I'm a realist but I'm also a dreamer and I'm not just a dreamer I'm a hopeaholic
1:29.1	so welcome Gloria Steinham how much have your early 1970s hopes and dreams of what feminism
1:37.1	could deliver for women come to fruition?
1:40.9	I think my dreams at that point were not big enough, you know, I think I was looking at
1:46.7	equality not transformation and on the one hand my dreams and ideas have become bigger, and therefore I think it's even
1:58.6	more important than I did before, you know, to make a society in which the paradigm is the circle, not a pyramid,
2:06.6	and we understand we are linked, we are not ranked.
2:09.7	On the other hand, I realize what a huge victory it is just to know we're not crazy
	...

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