“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
FRANZ KAFKA
A BOOK, LIKE A person, is born with the genetic imprint of the past, shaped by parental dreams and society’s politics, launched at a certain time in history—and then goes off to lead a life that none of those things could have predicted.
That’s certainly true for this one. In the time since it left my bed and board, I’ve often felt like a parent whose child has grown up and entered mysterious realms. At first, I just missed its intimate presence in my life. As Susan Sontag said after sending off a novel, “It was like taking a beloved person to the airport and returning to an empty house.” Then I kept talking to it in my head, wishing I could add this parable or that study, as if only my advice could keep it safe in the world. Finally I realized it was leading a more interesting life than any I could have foreseen, and I began the long parental process of letting go.
From the beginning, it was readers who made me see the folly of prediction. Their responses were so diverse and interesting, so understanding of the book’s spirit and yet so surprising in its uses, that I realized each person was bringing a unique reality to her or his half of the conversation. Not only did they supply all the elements I’d been stewing about not including, but they carried the book’s thesis into countries I never could have entered or imagined.
In the first weeks of a book tour, for instance, I noticed this offspring was introducing me to an unusually varied group of friends. Though I had thought its acceptance would be limited by its radical thesis—that systems of authority undermine our self-authority to secure obedience, thus self-esteem becomes the root of revolution—readers seemed never to have heard that what is radical can’t succeed, and what succeeds can’t be radical. If it was empowering in their daily lives, that was enough. In dozens and then hundreds of long informative letters, they shared experiences of self-esteem in response to the book’s parables; told what actions they were taking as a result of putting the internal and external together, especially if they hadn’t been active before; and described what new self-understanding had arrived, especially if they had been confusing motion with action in the past. They responded on street corners and in supermarkets, at lectures and book signings, in radio call-in shows and women’s reading clubs, on a national computer network of male executives and in a local self-help group for women prisoners, in a discussion on the future of democracy and a television forum on the Los Angeles rebellion, at a California convention of librarians and a Washington discussion of foreign policy, even at dinners where old friends told me about their lives in new ways. Whether in letters or in person, they often ended by telling me what friends, spouses, parents, children, co-workers, political leaders, employers, or lovers they were passing the book on to.
I was glad to see it progressing in this trustworthy way, being recommended by one reader to another, because I doubted that critics would praise a book with self-esteem in the title; my reporting on the reception of other self-esteem efforts in chapter I had convinced me of that. The intellectual establishment seemed to find this subject too soft and intangible to be taken seriously, while a newly influential right wing was clear that it was too subversive of authority to be tolerated.
But at least I had a sense of humor about it. In last year’s notes, I scribbled this parody of what a reviewer might say: “Revolution from Within has two flaws, both of them fatal. First, it portrays the individual as infinitely redeemable, a romantic notion that flies in the face of history. Second, it describes self-esteem as a birthright that can only be preserved by transforming education and child-rearing; by abandoning patriarchy, racial caste systems, monotheism, and hierarchy as the main form of human organization; indeed, by transforming Western civilization itself.”
That would have been tough—but fair. After all, it is what this book is saying.
But life and reviews are always a surprise. I certainly hadn’t anticipated seeing myself described as “the Ivan Boesky of Nookie” (more about that in a minute), and I’d forgotten that, when the message is unwelcome, the messenger becomes the focus of attention. Though reviewers for less prestigious publications found this book to be a pioneering blend of the personal and the political—in fact, the more obscure the review, the more favorable it was—critics for the most renowned publications here and in England had three main points:
The usually impersonal New York Times headlined: “SHE’S HER WEAKNESS NOW.” Newsweek described this book as just my “squishy exercise in feeling better.” A network television interview about the book was edited into such a frivolous “profile” that its woman producer eventually quit in protest. Journalists on both sides of the Atlantic theorized that I must have deserted serious political pursuits to write a self-help book for personal gain. A reporter for the Washington Post misread my romance parable as “falling in love with someone who treated her badly,” added accounts of other feminists’ supposedly unacceptable marriages or love affairs (one because her life was too conventionally heterosexual, another because hers wasn’t heterosexual enough), and wrote a nationally syndicated article headlined “LEADERS’ HYPOCRISY KILLED FEMINIST MOVEMENT.” On the other hand, a reporter for the New York Post decided that it was I who had treated my lover badly, and called this reversal bad for feminism, too. In support of this theory that I must have been interested only in his money, a writer for the New York Observer described me as “the Ivan Boesky of Nookie.”
Okay, some of this is funny now. But at the time, it was painful. Not only did such trivializing words hurt, but they obscured the book’s content, purpose, and politics. Even the serious disagreement I had anticipated—and would have welcomed—gave way to points like those above. For instance, I could find no major review that noted the book’s criticism of traditional childrearing, educational testing, the content of education, gender and race roles, separation from nature, or even monotheism as thieves of self-esteem. There was none that supported, opposed, or even noticed its striving for inclusiveness across lines of sex and race, class, sexuality, and ability; none that mentioned its linking of the social justice and self-realization movements; and no examination, pro or con, of self-esteem as a practical source of revolution. Though reviewers were heavy into the parables from my personal life, none acknowledged the larger points they had been included to make. When I responded to interviewers’ inevitably personal questions by explaining that an increased inner awareness had made me more effective as an activist—that I felt stronger, not weaker—this, too, was roundly ignored. Certainly, no major publication analyzed this book’s feminist world view, or took a look at self-esteem as a serious subject.
I began to wonder if I really had written what I thought I had written. Or if my self-esteem was high enough to survive writing a book about self-esteem.
Then, just as I was gaining comfort from traveling in Canada, where reviewers actually expressed interest in this linking of self-esteem to social change (an “intellectually interesting, well-researched and informative book,” said one review, and “revolutionary,” said another), Newsweek published a cover story: “THE CURSE OF SELF-ESTEEM: What’s Wrong with the Feel-Good Movement.” Its illustration was a drawing of a small man with a small dog, looking in a mirror to see a tall, handsome man and a large, handsome dog.
By now, I confess, I was talking back to the mainstream media in my head almost as much as I had once talked to my newly departed manuscript.
According to Newsweek, self-esteem advocates urged parents to praise children indiscriminately. “Who wants to be bothered waiting for a child to do something right,” this report asked rhetorically, “when it’s so much simpler just to praise him [sic] all the time.” (Okay, I thought, there must be a self-esteem expert somewhere who urges that, but in years of research, I’ve never met one. Indiscriminate anything only shows a child that no one is paying attention, thus she or he must not be worthy of it.) A guest essayist from England assigned to comment on this odd U.S. interest dispensed with both Plato and me by regretting the good old days when I used to say, “laudably, that ‘the examined life is not worth living,’ ” and then advised this country to “just grow up.” In fact, she argued, the world would be a safer place if U.S. self-esteem were lower. (That’s amusing, I thought, but isn’t history full of national inferiority complexes that resulted in hypermilitarism; for instance, Germany between world wars? And what about the U.S. identity crisis over a declining economy that coincided with aggression against such small countries as Grenada and Nicaragua?)
For Newsweek, however, the coup de grace was clearly a study that showed U.S. schoolchildren to be more self-confident about their math abilities than were their counterparts in Japan, even though the former were far less skilled in math, according to objective tests, than the latter. You could almost feel the writers’ triumph.
In fact, the report didn’t explain the difference that made sense of the study’s results: the distinction between situational self-esteem (how we compare ourselves with others) and core self-esteem (our sense of intrinsic worth). With that in mind, however, it became understandable that U.S. students might feel more self-confident about their math abilities in schools where math wasn’t emphasized and standards were low; while their counterparts in Japanese schools might well feel less self-confidence in schools where math was all-important and standards almost impossibly high. But no matter what the situational self-esteem, core self-esteem remains crucial. What Newsweek failed to note, for example, was that Japan has a far higher suicide rate than the U.S., and so many deaths from overwork that the phenomenon rates a special word in the language. Surely, there is no greater tragedy than lacking the self-esteem to value one’s own life.
But the oddest aspect of this cover story was the Gallup poll Newsweek commissioned for the occasion, and then buried in a sidebar. Its results showed that Americans were more likely to cite self-esteem as an important motivator than any of the other choices: Family duty or honor, Responsibility to community, Fear of failure, or Status in the eyes of others. A question even more relevant to the cover story’s thesis of the “curse” of the self-esteem movement was: “Is too much time and effort spent on self-esteem?” In spite of phrasing that invited an affirmative answer, and in spite of the sole alternative (“Time and effort could be better spent on work”) that made it seem as though work and self-esteem were mutually exclusive, 63 percent of Americans said: “The time and effort spent was worthwhile.”
In other words, the results of Newsweek’s own poll opposed its cover story’s thesis.
This chasm between what authorities believe and what people experience was similar to the distance I’d been encountering between reviewers and readers—sometimes also between intellectual women reviewers and everyday women readers. It was the greatest such distance I’d witnessed in my thirty years as a writer.
So there I was, feeling quite “crazy” and not a little depressed, as if my intentions—and even the reactions of readers—had become invisible. I was doing book readings that had to be moved to movie theaters, churches, school gyms, town libraries, and shopping malls to accommodate those who were interested, and hearing people talk about the book as energizing, activating, a needed unity of the internal and the external—not as a retreat from activism on their part or mine. Yet I was also reading critics and facing interviewers who assumed that I had repudiated my activist past, that I was suddenly attributing women’s problems to an individual weakness rather than a woman-hating society, and that my personal stories were the book’s sole content.
I confess that most of what I’ve told you about the quality and quantity of reader response was not what I was feeling then. I remember sitting in a Chicago hotel room, feeling negated by weeks of being told with great authority and publicity that I meant what I didn’t mean. Though I understood by then that those blows were hitting a not-quite-healed bruise of childhood neglect that sometimes made me feel less real than other people, they were not imagined. I felt stronger, yet I was being called weaker; I had included many kinds of subjects and people in these pages, yet only a narrow few were treated as visible; I thought I had written a book with serious political implications, yet I was being accused of deserting politics in general and feminism in particular. Though I had been as surprised as reviewers when this book had begun to appear on national best-seller lists a few weeks after publication, even those numbers meant little. When a friend called to congratulate me, for instance, I remember saying, “But you don’t understand—that just makes more people who won’t like it.” He laughed, but I did not.
Fortunately, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, an important book about the mainstream media’s retreat to old values in the face of feminist advances, had been published just a few months before mine. I hadn’t read it—I understood its value, but felt that my own years of dealing with the backlash meant I didn’t need to learn more—until wise readers explained it had helped them understand why they also felt the media was describing some book other than the one I had written.
Only a few chapters into it, I began to relearn the classic feminist lesson of being rescued and affirmed by other women’s experiences. By naming and documenting the political patterns behind common responses, Faludi reminded me (and thousands of other readers) to trust our own perceptions: there was a great will to misunderstand out there. I suddenly realized that, if I’d been watching another woman getting media treatment parallel to mine, I would have understood it in a minute and been angry on her behalf; yet it’s amazing how being the subject of something painful can keep you wondering what you did to warrant it. Only reading Faludi’s well-documented case histories made me realize that I wasn’t alone, and so might not be uniquely at fault either.
In example after detailed example, Faludi shows how statistics and studies have been shaped, perhaps unconsciously, to support the message of the backlash: Feminism is not the cure for women’s problems; it’s their cause. Even when the problems being discussed were those that only the women’s movement had been trying to solve—violence against women, for instance, or women’s double burden of working both in and outside the home—they were still said to stem from the changing of old roles, not from the need to change them even more. Her most famous example, the 1986 study in which researchers from Harvard and Yale statistically minimized women’s chances of finding a husband if they delayed marriage, was exaggerated by the media in very big stories, and clarified, if at all, in very small ones. (As Newsweek so famously put it, such women became “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to marry.) Though Faludi had first exposed the false statistical premises and reporting of this study in an article for Ms. magazine, I hadn’t thought of bias applied to this book’s reception until I read it again after my own media experience, and in the context of Faludi’s many other examples. The message I’d been getting from mainstream media began to make sense: If I or other women had self-esteem problems, they were a personal failing at best, and proof of feminism’s failure at worst. It was feminism’s fault for not solving them, not the fault of an unjust system for creating them.
No wonder there was such a will to personalize everything, to ask about the examples from my life that made up only a small part of the book, while ignoring the larger points they made. Instead of seeing shared experience as proof of larger political patterns, it was only an admission of individual weakness.
No wonder my inclusion of male readers was mostly ignored. If men came to see male superiority as an impossible goal that undermined their self-esteem, too, they would have an incentive to rebel against it, too. What if a critical mass of men decided to trade in “masculinity” for humanity?
No wonder the media was obsessed with my brief romance story, yet had totally ignored the equally personal but happy love story a few pages later. (Not one single reviewer or interviewer had ever asked me or written about that positive parable—the only personal one they had excluded. Amazing.) The first one supported the backlash belief that feminists can’t have good relationships with men. The second did not.
No wonder there was such a will to believe that I had become weak, that examples from my own life would disillusion the readers, and that I would lead women away from activism. The backlash reason was simple: wishful thinking.
Once I got a grip on the political rationale behind otherwise mysterious responses, I stopped talking back to the media in my head and began talking back in reality. I stopped feeling uncertain and started getting angry. In the course of the next few months of book touring, I spoke my mind, as I have in these pages. Getting unsaid words out in the air where they belonged not only helped objectively—after all, “the media” is only composed of people who are also struggling with social mythology, and who can’t read our minds—but it made space in my head to hear readers. I began listening, really listening. These stories are typical of what I heard:1
• In Detroit, a woman with a factory job and three children under eight stayed after a book signing to tell me about her burnout as a single mother. The killing work load hadn’t changed, she said, but something almost as basic had: she no longer felt she deserved it.
“I always thought an inner life was for people who went to college,” she said, “and meditating was what you did if you were religious. But when I read that getting into burnout is also a form of self-abuse, it really hit home. I realized that I hadn’t been making demands or even asking for help because I didn’t think I was worth helping. Suddenly, a question popped into my head: ‘Okay, kiddo, what do you want?’ I kept hearing it, so just for the hell of it, I started meditating on it. For twenty minutes before the kids got up in the morning, and again during my break from the line, I closed my eyes and let the question drift through my mind. After a few weeks, I found myself shifting from thinking only about what everybody else felt, to thinking about what I felt. It wasn’t that I found the answer right away, but I did find a place where I knew there would be an answer.”
In those months, she had lowered her dangerously high blood pressure, taught her hyperactive son to calm down and improve his basketball game by meditating on shooting a basket, and realized that what she wanted was help with her kids, some real friends, and her supervisor’s job. Those were things she never thought she had time for, much less a right to; yet they suddenly seemed like practical goals. “I’d been telling my kids and everybody else that I had no needs by the way I behaved,” she explained. “But after I started to treat what I wanted as important, I talked to another woman on the line who was also by herself with two kids. We actually rented a house together. It’s made a big difference—we take turns with our kids, and save money with only one washing machine and one TV. We also have each other’s company. It was such a relief to talk to another adult that we started inviting four women friends over to play poker once a week. Actually, the poker is kind of an excuse—it’s really a family session where we talk about how we feel and what we want, and help each other figure out what to do about it.
“I may or may not get this promotion, but at least I won’t have screwed myself by not asking for it. When things don’t work now, I get mad instead of depressed—a big change for me. I only slip backwards on the days when I forget to meditate and take time for myself. You won’t believe this, but the local zoning board tried to throw us out of our house because we’re not a legal family. I got scared again, and I could hear my Mom saying, ‘You can’t fight city hall.’ But then Tuesday rolled around, and a combination of meditating and my girlfriends persuaded me to fight. If we don’t win, we’ll find another house—and vote the bastards out.
“I thought I couldn’t take time for an inner life. The truth is, I can’t afford not to.”
As I listened to that woman’s story, the link between self-esteem and action seemed so natural that all the notions of inward exploring as weakness began to lose their sting.
• In Cleveland, a bookstore clerk told me he had been encouraged by chapter 3 to “un-learn” book categories. Instead of putting African-American books only under Black Interest, for instance, he now put additional copies under American History, Politics, and Current Events. “I had to fight the store manager to do it, but he came around when we actually sold a few more copies,” he explained. “It’s the first self-respecting thing I’ve done since I marched against South Africa in college.”
He also began to notice the way in which his daughter had been absorbing his view of himself and his job. “My daughter used to ask me why I was only a sales clerk, as if she were ashamed of me,” he explained. “It felt as angry as when she used to want only white dolls. But a few weeks after I moved the books around and brought her into the store to see what I’d done, she wrote a report for her fifth-grade class, ‘Black History Is All Our History.’ Of course, she didn’t tell me about it—her teacher did. But pretty soon, she started reading a children’s book from Africa, and the next thing I knew, she wanted to wear her hair in dreadlocks and I noticed she didn’t talk so much about envying her white friends. Just last week, she started helping me figure out what books for young readers I should recommend—which ones didn’t make anybody feel bad about themselves. She’s getting to be proud of the job we do together.
“After my daughter started changing, I realized that before, she’d been repeating my own childhood. I used to feel ashamed of my father. He was afraid of white people—with good reason—but I blamed him for this fear; it made me feel ashamed. I realize now my feelings about myself are just as important to my daughter as they are to me. Because I hated my job, she did, too. Because I behaved as if white people would always win, she envied them. And now that I’m beginning to be proud of myself, so is she. Thanks to the parallels between race and sexism in your book, I’ve also started to think about what my daughter learns from my attitude toward women. I know she’ll need woman-pride, too.”
Listening to him was reward enough for including the caste systems of sex and race as thieves of self-esteem. So was his showing me where copies of this book were now displayed in his store: under Black Interest, Women’s Interest, Men’s Studies, and Current Best Sellers.
• In Chicago, I met the administrator of a special program for adolescent boys with dropout or criminal records. He had known for years, he said, that strengthening self-esteem was the only way to change self-destructive behavior, but unfortunately, the conventional answers were still discipline, inflexible rules, and other enemies of self-authority. “Self-esteem is seen as self-indulgent,” he explained. “They think we’re trying to excuse past behavior when really, we’re just trying to change future behavior. But since your book wasn’t written in educationalese—and since you started out being a skeptic yourself—I’m giving it to the most hidebound officials I know to try to loosen them up.”
For me, that story would have been worth including male readers, even if he had been the only one.
• In Denver, a young woman gave me a slender manuscript in which she had written her first memories of sadistic sexual abuse by her father. “When it was going on, I used to feel as if I were watching from outside myself,” she explained, “and I pretended it was happening to somebody with a different name, a bad girl who deserved it. I entered into a world so separate that after a while, I couldn’t remember why my body hurt when it was over. That’s how I grew up to be what’s called a multiple personality—and also how I grew up believing I was a shameful freak.
“I never told anyone—not until I read what you said about multiple personality in your last chapter. It meant so much that you included this in a book for ‘normal’ people, and that you said we who are survivors might be ‘prophets of human possibilities.’ It’s the first time I’ve seen myself as strong or a survivor, and that I even have something to teach. For the first time, I thought: If I was strong enough to hypnotize myself and ‘split’ off personalities when I was such a little girl, I must be strong enough to bring them all together now. I’ve started to tell a few friends instead of hiding all the time, and I’m beginning to get some help from one of the few therapists who understands. We’re all encouraged to be false selves by injustice—maybe I’m not so separate after all. Maybe we’re all part of a continuum.”
The gift she gave me was far greater than mine to her.
But by far the most consistent response came from women who had been active feminists for years before retreating, and from women who’d been turned off by the women’s movement. They sounded remarkably alike. Both said feminism had come to seem distant, impersonal, and only for the strong: a way of helping “other” women when they themselves were barely hanging on. Both said the movement had been neglecting the personal and internal half of the personal/political equation.
As one veteran feminist put it: “Looking at self-esteem and the internal strengthening of women makes the movement feel juicy and nourishing again, not just full of necessary, impersonal, dried-up things like legislation and rallies.”
As a young waitress said: “I thought I wasn’t strong enough to be a feminist—but now I see that feminism is about strengthening women from the inside too.”
For myself, I was surprised that both groups expressed relief at discovering that I shared many of the same experiences and problems. If I wasn’t immune either, they said in various ways, then perhaps they were not personally at fault, there really was a sexual caste system at work, and together, we could change it. I hadn’t realized that I’d ever seemed invulnerable—one more lesson in how public life distances the few in order to disempower the many—but I began to be very glad that I’d heeded the feminist adage of the personal as political (and the political as personal) and included personal parables, no matter how the backlash had used it.
By the time I neared California and the last of this sporadic three-month book tour, reader responses had multiplied. Lines snaked around the block, people introduced themselves and organized in line, and the fact that this book had climbed to number one on the best-seller list and remained there, in spite of opposition, seemed to be viewed as their own triumph. As I moved West to warmer climates, readers began to phone and ask if they could bring sleeping bags to wait in line overnight. I’d never witnessed anything like it. I began to feel there was a new critical mass of people who had learned the hard way, as I had, that activism without introspection and self-discovery turns into imitation at best and burnout at worst; and that introspection without activism leads to isolation and passivity. There seemed to be a community of full-circle consciousness with nowhere to go, no institutions of its own or even places to gather, and so it had assembled around this ad hoc signal.
At Cody’s, the largest bookstore in Berkeley, for instance, there were people crowded into an upstairs room and a balcony, sitting on the staircase, and standing downstairs in the aisles around loudspeakers. Susan Faludi, whom I had not met before and who lives in San Francisco, had been invited to introduce me. She explained to the crowd that she was going to read the experience of a twenty-two-year-old college student, written in response to my parables about my mother. I can only characterize that long narrative here, in part because this young woman’s violent father has forbidden the printing of her name or any recognizable detail. But it was the story of this student’s own mother, “a beautiful and fiercely intelligent woman,” who had been ignored or abused for so much of her life that she spent years in an abusive marriage, and eventually tried to commit suicide.
“At the hospital,” Susan said, reading this young woman’s words, “my mother stayed in a quasi-coma for weeks, not responding to a word or gesture I made. I decided to read to my mother about you and your mother. Even though she was sleeping long and white in a cold room, I knew she could hear me. I read until the nurses started repeating phrases and themes to each other. But my mother didn’t respond. Finally, I gave up and just sat there with her, a certain silence and smell filling the room, and started to prepare myself for her death.
“And then suddenly her eyes opened. … She often tells me that when she was ‘asleep’ in the hospital, she was actually thinking about your words, about your mother, about all the songs so many women never get a chance to sing.”
The sequence of her recovery after this crisis was like a “rebirth,” as her daughter put it. “Now, my mother is a business major in college, raises protest signs with me in pro-choice marches, and is dating as often as she likes with whomever she likes. In her own words: ‘The younger the better.’ She goes hiking, reads voraciously.
“As for myself, I’m graduating soon with a major in English, am dating one of the few good men on earth, and have embarked on a writing career with a short-story collection dedicated to my mother and to you. I know this sounds hopelessly melodramatic, but I know that if it wasn’t for you, both my mother and I would not have survived.
“It is not often that language transforms itself into a true healing device—but it did one morning with a mother and a daughter.”
The crowd had been quiet at the beginning of this long story, then laughed with surprise at the mother’s unexpected signs of spirit, then grown silent again with a new kind of quiet. Instead of anonymous people filling disparate spaces on two floors, there was now a group whose links to each other brought the spaces together. Instead of the silence of strangers, there was a new willingness to turn toward each other, smile, make room; a new quality in the air.
Stories are medicine for our individual spirits; I could imagine nothing more healing to mine. They are also powerful makers of community.
That was the turning point of my post-book journey. Instead of feeling discouraged and confused, I felt the strength of readers coming back to me. Instead of losing something when this book left home, I understood that I had gained the learning, comfort, and magic of community.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to leave you thinking that controversy is ever over. While writing this many months later, I picked up a copy of Newsweek and found this book still referred to as “an embarrassment.” Even feminist journals published long after mainstream reviews also reflected difference. “It’s hard to believe that Revolution from Within is going to be good for feminism,” said The Women’s Review of Books. “[H]er new call to revolution feels like a retreat.”2 On the other hand, On the Issues said, “Seven months after its publication, the controversy over Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within can be seen in its proper light: as a national anxiety attack about the fear of hope.”3 Knowing both publications, I can vouch for their equal concern for women’s welfare. The first was not indulging in wishful backlash thinking, but worrying about taking time from activism, and the second was using the internal to power that activism.
So what made the difference? I can only put myself in their shoes. After all, a decade ago, I would have been on the skeptical side of internal concerns myself. I can empathize with that feminist naysayer, as well as with intellectual women reviewers writing for mainstream publications, who may have been convinced, as I once was, that sacrificing emotion to intellect, the intangible to the tangible, was necessary to have an impact in the male world. To them, I may have seemed to be doing the feminist equivalent of “eating watermelon” when I chose the “feminine,” mysterious, internal, whole-body subject of self-esteem.
Or perhaps the problem was the linear one of assuming that childhood and inner conflicts are something one resolves first; as if inner exploring achieves “normalcy” and then stops. Since I had been functioning quite well, looking inward must have seemed a mystifying regression. In fact, it is a continuing, never-ending source of rebellion, not just a way of changing old patterns—but that was a long way from viewing it as therapy.
Or perhaps I’d succumbed to the linear view myself. Having started out so far on the external, activist side, I may have taken it for granted and overemphasized what was newer to me. Was there an imbalance in these pages? If so, I welcome this chance to set it right, and to ask you to unlearn again (think of chapter 3) the infallibility of those of us who happen to appear in print.
In some ways, however, this difference was a rerun of the seventies division between “politicos” and “cultural” or “spiritual” feminists. I had been on the political side in those days, but even then it seemed to me there was room for both—if only for the tactical reason that leaving out big chunks of women’s experience left it with nowhere but patriarchal places to go. By the 1980s when I was thinking about writing this book, I’d come to agree with what feminist theologian Mary Daly had predicted: that the internal would grow out of the external. As she wrote more than twenty years ago, “Women should be sensitive to the fact that the movement itself is a deeply spiritual event which has the potential to awaken a new and post-patriarchal spiritual consciousness.”4
I confess, however, that I still have a harder time empathizing with those male intellectuals who seem to believe a serious political message can’t be conveyed in a personal, accessible way, and who treat self-esteem as “selfish,” especially when sought by groups on whose self-sacrifice they have been depending. Nonetheless, I can see that anyone schooled in either/or might think I was just beginning a new hierarchy in which the internal was on top. They might mistake my synthesis for an antithesis of their thesis, if you see what I mean.
Whatever the reason for differences in perception, we’re where our experience has put us. Thus, a critical mass of us may have to experience the full circle—internal exploring as a continuing source of energy, not just as emergency therapy—before we can ditch either/or thinking, and before a full-circle approach no longer needs explaining. Like modern theories of fish schooling or birds flocking that posit a critical mass acting together as an energy field in which “emergent properties have nothing to do with the original rules,”5 we may have to wait until a paradigm change is pervasive enough to transform the centers of culture and education.
If so, there’s a collective reward as well as an individual one. Even if we are not among those who trigger the critical mass, each one of us is still helping to create it. Perhaps those worried about the impact of this book will have to wait and see its long-term results—as will I.
For those who still mistrust inner exploring and “the examined life” as detracting from activism, as I once did, however, perhaps the responses of readers are comforting. Their stories are a kind of quilt in which each one is a special stitch, color, or pattern, but all together, they create a design.
I tell you all this about these experiences of the past year because you, too, may be finding resistance from those around you or within yourself; a similar fear that looking inward will negate what it actually nourishes.
I also offer differing responses because I’ve come to the conclusion that each reader will have to be the authority on whether I was clear enough about self-esteem as a source of positive action—not a substitute for it—and about positive action as a source of self-esteem, for it is this never-ending spiral that I meant and still mean, with all my heart.
As for getting clear and getting angry, I offer my post-publication experience as proof that a book is also a process that never ends. I’m thinking in particular of a reviewer who said I had “forgotten to get angry” about sexism. I don’t agree: this book is about the step after getting angry, which is finding a center of power within ourselves to change an unjust system; but if you also missed anger in these pages, you should know that it arrived later in the postpartum process and became the energy for another turn of the spiral.
And if you find that you, too, are talking back to disembodied critics in your head, I hope you will consider getting your words out in the air. That silent dialogue only allows someone else to be the prime mover, but once you speak, you become a force on your own. More important, getting the words out leaves room in your head to hear understanding voices around you, and your own inner voice.
In my case, a reward was, is, and continues to be learning from readers (and now that this book is being translated into fifteen languages by publishers in other countries, including some in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, I’m looking forward to learning much more from readers; as a writer, I promise to keep giving it back). Gradually even now, however, the quality and quantity of responses have changed a few firmly made-up minds in the media.
Because our books had turned into such unexpected best sellers, for instance, Susan Faludi and I were interviewed after that session at Cody’s by two women editors from Time magazine, whose reviewers had originally been skeptical of Faludi’s thesis and found mine not personal enough. As it turned out, I think it was less what we said than the depth of interest they heard from readers that impressed them.
When our joint interview became part of a cover story analyzing the popularity of our two feminist books, Susan and I found ourselves looking out together from the cover of Time. It was a pairing that made sense—her book was documenting what was wrong; mine was exploring ways to make it right—but the heart of Time’s cover story came straight from listening to readers. For instance:
“Something must have happened in the climate of relations between men and women for these books to have such an impact. … Faludi’s book has set off firecrackers across the political battlefield. … She has inspired men and women to take a new look at the messages they absorb, messages that act as barriers to understanding or to justice.”
“Many reviewers … virtually ignored the political implications of [Steinem’s] thesis in order to elaborate on the minimal amount of personal details she chooses to divulge. … But with ordinary readers, Steinem’s message has broken through. They don’t ask her about the personal much. They want to know about the self and how to gain and trust their own. It is a fine triumph for this woman … to succeed in holding the feminist course while expanding its horizons to include everyone.”6
What more could any writer ask?