When Gloria Steinem’s airplane touched down in Bombay in 1957, she couldn’t have recognized that her keep in India would turn out to be what she later referred to as a “pivotal, life-dividing occasion [that] made me who I’m”.
She was 22, with a level in authorities from Smith faculty and was travelling on a Chester Bowles fellowship.
India was “not solely a spot I’d at all times needed to go, however (additionally) an escape from a really sort and tempting man to whom I used to be engaged and knew I shouldn’t marry,” Steinem later wrote. The prospect of marrying Blair Chotzinoff, a pilot from a well-connected New York household, depressed her “enormously as a result of marriage meant the top of life to me”.
Funds had been quick, so she wangled a free airline ticket in trade for an article “that I nonetheless really feel responsible to today as a result of I by no means wrote”.
Whereas in London ready for her Indian visa, she found she was pregnant and obtained an unlawful abortion – an expertise that underpinned her conviction that, with out management over replica, girls couldn’t management their very own lives.
Steinem, who died this week at the age of 92, arrived in Delhi with romantic expectations of “ageless magnificence and jewelled elephants”. They had been shortly displaced. Driving from the airport, she had what she referred to as her “first glimpse of Asian poverty”, seeing individuals sleeping on pavements and doorsteps.
She lived at Miranda Home, one in every of Delhi College’s main girls’s faculties, immersing herself in scholar life.
“At night time in our rooms we have now lengthy classes and are requested all the pieces: the Christians’ conception of God, the intricacies of western lingerie, the courting system, how a lot milk the American cow provides,” Steinem wrote.
Steinem’s Indian years have been extensively documented by Rashida Shafiq of Southern Methodist College, who drew on her fellowship stories and different archival materials for a lately printed PhD thesis.
She adopted the sari as on a regular basis gown, writing: “Saris make one stand straighter and stroll extra slowly and fear much less about time and effectivity.”
India was not solely unfamiliar territory. Her mom and paternal grandmother had been Theosophists, a part of a non secular motion that drew closely on Hindu and Buddhist concepts similar to karma and reincarnation, and in school Steinem had written a paper on the Communist get together of India.
When her fellowship cash ran out, she supported herself by writing for Indian newspapers, doing promoting work and taking occasional modelling jobs – together with posing in saris.
Wider journey within the nation introduced a few of her most essential encounters.
She met Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the previous princess and follower of Mahatma Gandhi who grew to become unbiased India’s first well being minister, and spent two hours with Indira Gandhi, whom she described as “shy to uncertainty, mild and somewhat whimsical”.
At a Radical Humanist research camp in Mussoorie, followers of the previous communist MN Roy debated democracy, particular person freedom and political organisation. Steinem later stated she discovered there that “radical” needn’t imply violent or extremist, however might imply “going to the foundation,” and that “the means we select dictate the ends we obtain”.
However a few of her most lasting political training occurred on the street.
On a journey from Calcutta to Kerala, Steinem travelled third class in a railway carriage reserved for ladies, which she later described as “a dormitory on wheels”.
Girls settled in with youngsters and meals, nursing infants, sharing tiffins and speaking. They needed to know all the pieces about her and conversations ranged throughout marriage, childbirth, contraception and household life. “Had I been remoted in a automobile, this speaking circle might by no means have occurred,” Steinem wrote later.
Years earlier than American feminist “consciousness-raising” teams introduced girls collectively to find that supposedly personal issues had been broadly shared, Steinem had watched girls in India trade intimate experiences amongst themselves.
However the expertise she considered most essential got here after caste violence erupted in what was then Madras state in 1957.
Steinem joined employees related to the motion of Vinoba Bhave, a number one disciple of Gandhi, who had been strolling from village to village attempting to counter rumours, discourage revenge and produce individuals collectively to speak.
She travelled with little greater than “a cup, a comb and the sari I wore”.
In settlements scarred by violence, conferences had been held beneath bushes and in village courtyards.
“I listened as villagers narrated burnings, murders, thefts and rapes, with worry and trauma needing no translation,” she wrote.
The lesson was to hear earlier than providing options. “Ask the individuals what they need, don’t inform them what they want,” was how Steinem later described it.
She remembered “the traditional and fashionable magic of teams during which anybody could communicate in flip, everybody should hear and consensus is extra essential than time”.
“If you wish to understand how individuals dwell, it’s important to go the place they dwell; in order for you individuals to take heed to you, it’s important to take heed to them,” she later stated. “I imagine I discovered that in India.”
Steinem returned to america in 1958, greater than a decade earlier than she grew to become one of many main figures within the girls’s motion.
“I couldn’t combine into the remainder of my life these two very, very essential years,” she recalled. “It was solely after the ladies’s motion began that hyperlinks started to be cast.”
She repeatedly linked her later organising strategies with India. “The primary organising I did was in India, although I didn’t realise it then,” she stated.
Her years travelling throughout America as a feminist activist, she later wrote, had been “only a western model of strolling in villages”.
And when Ms. journal, which Steinem co-founded, produced its spring 1972 preview difficulty, its cowl featured an American housewife depicted because the many-armed Hindu goddess Kali, pregnant together with her arms clutching a frying pan, duster, phone, iron and different symbols of the home calls for positioned on girls.
Steinem stated the picture “had come out of my Indian previous”.
