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"Tonight, HBO airs Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words, an hour-long documentary that looks at the feminist icon's life and almost 50-year-career. (Which is still going strong.) We at Teen Vogue are proud feminists\u2014and after seeing the documentary, we were humbled to get to talk about substance and style, journalism and feminism with one of the most accomplished women around.\n\nLeigh: I'm interested in hearing about your experience early on as a female journalist in New York City. In the documentary that you couldn't get an apartment in the city when you first started out because it was expected that if you made a certain amount of money, you were probably a prostitute or a call girl.\n\nGloria: I hope that that day is gone, although I am told that the financial scrutiny of your assets and so on is still a little higher for women than for men. As a freelance reporter, the hardest thing was to get any kind of serious or political assignment. I made it worse by taking the assignment to become a Playboy Bunny\u2014that was such a career error I can't begin to tell you. As old as I am, somebody who disagrees or is trying to put me down in some way will introduce me as an ex-Bunny. That doesn't mean I'm sorry I did it because I realized that these \"glamorous\" jobs were not glamorous\u2014just underpaid, and physically difficult. I'm glad that I learned that but from a career point of view, it was a mistake.\n\nLeigh: So after that piece ran, it was a challenge to get the kind of writing work you wanted to take on.\n\nGloria: I remember I had just gotten an assignment from Show magazine to write about the US Information Agency because I lived in India for a couple years and I'd been aware of its impact or effect there and I wanted to write about. But as soon as I did the bunny thing, it disappeared. Instead, I was given assignments to go undercover in some semi-sexual way. It's much better now, there are many more women writing seriously and politically, but I think the low point for me was walking into what was then Life magazine, sent by my agent for a serious assignment, and my editor looked up from his desk and said, We don't want a pretty girl, we want a writer. Go home, and that was it.\n\nLeigh: One of the things you say in the documentary is that you work very hard and it's often attributed to looks, which is really painful. I want to talk about that in a little bit more depth in terms of the challenges women face based on their looks and being taken seriously.\n\nGloria: There is the notion that an attractive woman, whatever that means in society, a pretty girl can't be smart. We are still identified by our looks instead of our hearts or heads. That's why it's much better to break the rules. If the rules worked, we'd be able to see it. If women were able to sleep to the top, there would be many more women at the top.\n\nLeigh: What do you hear from young girls about the challenges that face them today?\n\nGloria: Physical safety is huge. And sometimes in their own families, because it's still the case that the sexual abuse of girls is most likely to happen in their families, either from a family member or someone who has access to the household. And it's still the case that women don't feel as safe in the street as men do, or girls don't as much as boys do, so I think it's important to say our bodies belong to us, no one else, no one has a right to impose on us physically, nothing justifies it for no reason if we're not giving permission.\n\nLeigh: The documentary touches on the fact that you had a somewhat challenging girlhood.\n\nGloria: Well it happens that my mother\u2014a wonderful, loving, intelligent woman\u2014her spirit had been broken before I was born. She was periodically unable to take care of herself, so I was taking care of my mother, and I bet a lot of your readers are in that situation for one reason or another; they're young people looking after an adult person instead of the other way around. It's a very common experience. Like everything, it has an up and a downside. It makes you grow up too soon, you know, to be responsible too soon. But it makes you competent.\n\nLeigh: Do you have any advice for a girl who is going through something along those lines?\n\nGloria: Well I do think looking at other people to whom this has happened is especially helpful to a lot of people in this situation. I would say to realize you're not alone, other people have experienced this, to know it will give you some advantages, you know, such as the ability to care for yourself and navigate in the world. But it also has disadvantages, and the best cure for that is companionship. So if you can find a girlfriend who's in the same situation or read biographies or look at the public life of someone else, you know, all of those things help.\n\nLeigh: In addition to having friends to lean on, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the importance of mentors.\n\nGloria: The trouble with the word mentor is it seems like a one-way street. I think partnerships between younger and older women with different levels of experience in the same field are important, but they work best if they're balanced, so that the older more experienced person understands that they're also learning from the younger ones. And certainly that's been true for me, I learn at least as much from women who could be my daughters and granddaughters as they may learn from me\u2014I think that's a good lesson because it keeps you from imitating. You want to be unique, not like someone else.\n\nLeigh: Continuing on the topic of finding your own path, you say in the documentary that you were drawn to political reporting early on. Where did your interest in politics originate?\n\nGloria: You know, it's hard to know where things come from but my mother told me stories when I was a little girl about the depression\u2014how Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had been born into wealthy families but identified with the poor, and understood that people wanted to be independent, not dependent, and therefore invented job programs that helped people out of the depression. I think her stories made me understand that politics is an essential part of daily life and not separate from it. Politics was a place where you could improve daily life, so I suspect that that was the origin of interest. I never wanted to be a politician or elected person myself, so I loved to work for other women who did\u2014and hope that more girls will do that. The problem is the feeling that we're divided from politics, that our vote doesn't count or what we do doesn't count, in fact everything we do counts.\n\nfacebook dialogPinterest\n\nLeigh: It's easy to feel powerless in the face of such huge global issues. How would you encourage young women to get started in terms of activism?\n\nGloria: The people who benefit from the system as it exists are the ones who tell us that we're powerless. Actually, any change, any revolution, even, is built from the bottom up, like a house. You can't build it from the top down. The most effective way of thinking, I've found, is to behave as if everything we do matters, because the truth is we don't know exactly which thing will matter more. Try to infuse meaning and change in each thing you're doing. People have told me something that I did that was very small marked a turning point in their lives and then on the other hand, I spent weeks preparing to testify about something to Congress that had no impact at all! So if you proceed in that way\u2014that everything matters\u2014it makes life more fun and interesting and you become more effective.\n\nLeigh: There's a section in the documentary when they show the Larry King clip where you're essentially publically bullied, I wondered if you could discuss how you dealt with that, since bullying is such a big issue for young women today.\n\nGloria: It's very painful, I think we need to bully-proof ourselves, and that usually consists of consciously choosing to hang out with people who make you feel smart, not dumb. People who support you\u2014because we're social creatures, we get our image of ourselves from others. We need to affirmatively choose to hang out with people who have faith in us, who encourage our dreams and our talents.\n\nLeigh: Society somewhat conditions girls are to be competitive with each other...\n\nGloria: That's inevitable, that's universal, and every marginalized group is taught to compete for the favor of the central group. In Australia, women call it the \"tall poppy syndrome,\" you know, so the supposedly inferior group is taught to compete with each other for the favors of the supposedly superior group, it's not particular to females, but it certainly affects females.\n\nLeigh: Do you have any strategies for getting past that? I think the school environment naturally sets up this oppositional scenario in terms of ranking, grades and scores.\n\nGloria: Each person will find strength in different ways. But one thing is to realize those external tests have nothing to do with you, in fact college entrance boards have no predictive value for how well you will do in college after the first year, intelligence tests have no predictive value. You may have to deal with them because the college you want to get into cares about SAT scores, but you should know in your heart that most of the people who have accomplished something, including women in this world, had nothing to do with college boards, they maybe didn't even go to college. In my case, it took me 25 years to get over college because I was being taught, with good will, material in which women didn't exist and if they did exist, we were always secondary. There's a book I would recommend to anybody who's thinking about competition, it's called No Contest: The Case Against Competition, and it demonstrates that most admired human accomplishments have come from cooperation, not competition. It shows that competition produces one winner who is then immediate worried about losing the next time. What allows people to become productive is the faith of a group of other people who believe in them.\n\nLeigh: That seems like it leads me perfectly to asking you about founding Ms. Magazine in 1971. What was the energy in the room when you were putting that first issue together? A lot of our readers have their own blogs or zines and are very interested in expression through writing and art.\n\nGloria: Ms. was a group of women writers and editors, all of whom had been working for magazines we didn't really read. None of us really had a magazine we really trusted and related to, because it was only too clear that they were catalogs, they were all about the ads, not about the reader. So we all gathered in the room and started to talk about this possibility\u2014 we asked each other what did we want to write about in a magazine that we had been unable to write and that was really the energy behind Ms.\n\nLeigh: If someone had an idea for a style feature in Ms., is that something you worried about or tried to shy away from because that's the type of piece you would find in a traditional women's magazine or was the thinking Let's do this our way?\n\nGloria: We wanted to do it in a different way. I mean for instance I can remember an article distinguishing between style and fashion\u2014we said fashion is what other people want you to look like and what the designers put out there, what the color is for the year. Style is your own personal unique expression.\n\nLeigh: On the topic of style, in the documentary you say Holly Golightly was a big inspiration for you. Tell me about your style inspirations.\n\nGloria: The reason Holly Golightly appealed to me so much was not only because the way she looked\u2014if I had seen a photograph of her without the film, I would not have been so magnetized\u2014it was the whole film, There's a book now out about the making of Breakfast At Tiffany's, which points out it was the first Hollywood film in which a woman was allowed to be sexual and not be punished. I'd never thought of that before. I also very much identified with her, coming from a very country, out-of-it poor background, as it says in the movie and in the book: \"walking down a country road every day and one day just not coming back.\" I identified with her as a person, so I think the rebellion of her streaks in her hair, appealed to me for content as well as looks.\n\nLeigh: The other style moment in the documentary is your classic aviator shades, which you said you used to hide behind.\n\nGloria: Well first of all, I'm very near-sighted, so I really did need glasses, and secondly, growing up, people were always pinching me on the cheek and so I felt I had a very fat face. Those things were undercurrent somewhere, you know, causing me to wear my hair down and wear big glasses. I don't do it so much anymore, I have contact lenses and I pull my hair back, but you know, I think that was a way of looking at the world without the world looking at me.\n\nLeigh: Are you a naturally outgoing person, a natural public speaker, or was that something you had to work toward?\n\n Photo: Jenny Warburg/ courtesy of HBO\n\nGloria: Well mostly no, I'm an outgoing person but I was terrified of public speaking and didn't do it until my mid-30s. Indeed I put much effort into not doing it! I never would have done it if it hadn't been for the women's movement, because I got so desperate when I was unable to publish stories in women's magazines or even in New York magazine where I was working that reflected what I could see was a hugely important movement, so I decided to go out and speak about it. But I still couldn't imagine speaking by myself. My major symptom of nervousness is I lose all of my saliva. And each tooth gets like a little sweater on it, so you can't get your lip over it, it's quite terrifying. So I asked a friend of mine to speak with me, so we could do it as a team, because I thought if I just couldn't do it, if I just came to the end of my ability to do it in the particular place, she could sort of laugh and pick it up.\n\nLeigh: One of the quotes in the very beginning of the documentary that you reference is the Susan B. Anthony quote that the goal is not to make young woman grateful, it's to make them ungrateful, so they keep going. You have some great, as you've called them, A-Ha moments that do just that in your arsenal\u2014what ideas do you want to pass on to the Teen Vogue audience?\n\nGloria: This may just be my current one, you can judge whether it's right or not, but because I've been reading the statistics about how much college debt there is. There's now more college debt than there is credit card debt. I've also been listening to women on campus that are beginning to realize they're graduating with the same amount of debt as men, but earning less to pay it back and also probably staying out of the pay labor force for three years or so to have children. It's unfair that any student graduates with debt, it keeps you from experimenting and being free and doing what you want to do\u2014I can't think of any other developed country that imposes this on its young people. It's even worse for women. And they have every right to be mad as hell about that."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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