This is what 76 looks like. While Gloria Steinem is known for her years as a journalist, activist and feminist, she’s been dogged by the catchphrase she coined, in a slightly different form, when she turned 40.
“I found that people wrongly thought I was saying people should look like me,” she says, laughing. “I meant that we should look like ourselves. We’ve been lying [about our ages] so long, who would know?”
Age hasn’t tempered her passion for equality for all — even Sarah Palin, whose politics she deplores but whose right to run for office, regardless of how many children she has, Steinem supports. Or, as she puts it, “I defend her right to be wrong.”
She’s leading a panel about sexual violence at the Brooklyn Museum today at 2 p.m. Here are four works she calls “Aha!” books — ones she promises will leave the reader “a slightly changed person.”
— by Barbara Hoffman
The Mermaid and the Minotaur
by Dorothy Dinnerstein
We have been made to believe that it’s natural and inevitable for women — and not men — to raise children. This book will convince you that returning in a new way to the times and cultures in which both men and women raised children is the key to balance with nature, and even world peace.
Exterminate All the Brutes
by Sven Lindqvist
Brief, brilliant and well-written, this book does nothing less than explain the invention of racism to justify taking over other people’s lands. It shows how theories about race were popularized to such a degree that annihilating a race seemed inevitable . . . [and that] this normalization of extreme racism is what allowed the hatred of Jews to flourish and the Holocaust to take place.
Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust
edited by Sonja Hedgepeth
and Rochelle Saidel
If we had known what happened 60 years ago, we might have understood the connection between genocide and the occupation of female bodies; the use of sexual terrorism as a weapon; and what continues from the rape camps of Bosnia to the mass brutalities in Rwanda.
At the Dark End of the Street
Black Women, Rape, and Resistance
by Danielle McGuire
History is often tailored to reduce danger to the status quo. That is evident in this telling of the civil-rights movement, [in which activist] Fannie Lou Hamer’s grandmother had 23 children, 20 by rape, but Fannie Lou herself was sterilized.