My Take on "Gloria," the New Documentary about Steinem's Life
"Gloria: In Her Own Words" is airing on HBO Monday evening. I found the documentary pretty problematic. It refused to explicitly tackle race issues, either during the height of the Second Wave or more recently, when Steinem made a number of controversial statements about the relationship between race and gender during the 2008 Democratic primary.
Though there are interviews in Gloria about how upper-middle class, straight feminists came to embrace lesbian rights and economic justice for poor women, there is no explicit discussion of an equally enduring and arguably more fraught issue: the relationship between feminism and struggles for racial equality. The film does feature archival footage of 1970s white feminists arguing that men’s only bars are the equivalent of
