Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, journalist, and inspiration to generations of women, will be in Cobleskill next Thursday to kick off SUNY Cobleskill’s 2008 Ch-Ch-Ch Changes lecture series.
Yes, that Gloria Steinem.
“I’m speechless,” said longtime Cobleskill activist and writer Sue Spivack, who was living in New York City in the 1970s when Ms. Steinem first gained national attention. “I’ll certainly go and see her.
“It was an amazing experience to have it ‘all’ clarified—all the issues. Young women today take it all for granted. But there’s so much history here…”
Ms. Steinem will speak at 7:30pm in SUNY Cobleskill Bouck Hall Auditorium on Thursday, October 2.
Her lecture is free, but Holly Cargill-Cramer, SUNY Cobleskill’s director of communications and one of the women behind Ch-Ch-Changes, said she expects a crowd.
“Yes, it’s the real Gloria Steinem,” Ms. Cargill-Cramer said with a laugh. “Can you believe it? I almost can’t.”
Ms. Cargill-Cramer found herself walking on air when she met Ms. Steinem by chance at a Woman’s Press Club event in Albany more than a year ago—Ms. Steinem was at the Capital to testify in favor of some legislation.
“I was totally stunned, I gushed to the poor woman. But the next day, every woman under 35 that I told about it said, ‘Gloria, who?’ I was appalled.
So was Provost Anne Myers, then acting college president.
Realizing that, even in high school, even things like the Vietnam War were being condensed into two days, they came up with some money for Ch-Ch-Ch- Changes, billed as “A Cultural Retrospective in Lecture and Art.”
Last year’s series included Civil Rights leader Minniejean Brown Trickey, hip hop author Jeff Chang, and environmentalist Adam Werbach; Ms. Steinem was first on the must-have list, was already booked.
But Ms. Cargill-Cramer kept trying and this time, with little fanfare, Ms. Steinem said she’d be there on the 2th.
“I was in Middle School when the women’s movement really got going and because those were such formative years, I think it impacted me more than my sister, who was just two years older,” Ms. Cargill-Cramer said.
“I do think young women today take it all for granted. Maybe that’s a good thing. I have a 21-year-old daughter who’s never questioned what she could and couldn’t do. But at the same time, it’s important to understand what’s really recent history.”
Ms. Spivack agreed, pointing out that though a lot hasn’t changed for women, what has changed “is their ability to dream. In my family, my mother did, but my mother-in-law lived very shuttered…It created a lot of sadness.
“But it’s complicated. You can win the battle—win the right to be a guy in the corporate world—then realize you didn’t change anything.”
Ms. Spivack said she was lucky that her mother told her she “could have it all,” but said it’s still a balancing act, especially when it comes to family.
“I see it with my daughter-in-law,” she said. “I was lucky. I was an artist and we lived “poor” in a place where we could. I didn’t start my work in the schools till my children were a little older…”
Karen Cookson of Sharon Springs had a hand in bringing Ms. Steinem to Baylor University in Texas when she was teaching there in the late 1970s.
“It was 1976 or ’77 and we knew the administration wouldn’t let us get Gloria Steinem so we asked for Barbara Jordan instead—knowing she’d be out of the country.”
When Congressman Jordan said she couldn’t make it, Ms. Cookson said, the dean said, sure, go with their alternate.
“And that was Gloria Steinem,” she said with a laugh. “She came and she wowed us all.”