Gloria Steinem wows crowd at college

10/8/2007

By Patsy Nicosia

Gloria Steinem wows crowd at college

Leave it to the First Man.
“Hi, I’m Mr. Dr. Ann Myers,” said jokester Guy Garrett of Summit by way of introduction to Gloria Steinem Thursday.
Mr. Garrett is married to SUNY Cobleskill Provost Ann Myers, part of the team that “landed” the feminist icon as a speaker while Dr. Myers was acting president.
Ms. Steinem had surely heard the quip before, but still laughed as she chatted with fans—there was no other word—posed for photographs, and signed autographs before her hour-long talk.
As the kick-off to the 2008 Ch-Ch-Changes lecture series, Ms. Steinem’s talk drew a standing-room-only crowd and two standing ovations.
The irony that Ms. Steinem was speaking just before the vice presidential debate wasn’t lost on anyone; as soon as she was done taking questions a huge TV screen descended from the Bouck Hall ceiling and the drama switched to Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.
“Are we going to have a good time tonight or what?” Ms. Steinem asked crowd.
Ms. Steinem, 74, said she was fortunate to have lived through half-century from 1950 and 2000, “because it allows me to testify…to see how far we’ve come in 50 years and see how far we need to go in the next 50.”
With the November election on everyone’s minds, Ms. Steinem said she wasn’t going to tell anyone who to vote for.
“But I’m perfectly comfortable telling you who I’m going to vote for.”
Ms. Steinem has endorsed Barack Obama. With him in the White House, she said “the country would begin to look more like the world.”
Ms. Steinem, who attended school in Toledo, Ohio and Washington, DC before desegregation, spent a summer teaching DC youngsters how to swim—the only white in the pool and an eye-opening experience.
But it wasn’t “till I got mad for myself” that she helped jumpstart what became the Women’s Movement, she said.
Ms. Steinem said real politics is in day-to-day living, pointing out men, too, have gained from what’s been accomplished.
“When I talk to groups of men, what they miss most is having had fathers who weren’t there,” she said.
“If men become the fathers they might have had, we’ll have a chance.”
Still, Ms. Steinem said she has to laugh when someone tells her, ‘You must be so happy you won.’
“They also told me, ‘That will never happen.’ What you’re hearing today? That’s what they said to me 50 years ago.”
Applause and laughter peppered Ms. Steinem’s remarks; promises to the men in the crowd that by virtue of being there, they’d “be protected when the revolution came,” drew good-natured shouts of thanks.
Speaking specifically to the upcoming Presidential election, Ms. Steinem said she believes the reason Sarah Palin was chosen to be John McCain’s running mate—instead of someone he’d have preferred, like Maine Senator Olympia Snow—was because “the Evangelical Christian right wing would not have allowed it on the issue of abortion. That’s all it comes down to.
“Hopefully you and I will live to see the day that reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right.”
“Obama and Biden aren’t perfect,” either,” she allowed. “We’ll have to pressure them a lot.”
Ms. Steinem’s time ran out before her talk did.
“We don’t have time to applaud,” she said, checking her watch. “You made the mistake of being interested and I got carried away.”
For another half hour, she took thoughts from the audience and she continued to talk with admirers until joining SUNY Cobleskill President Don Zingale to watch the debate.
The debate was also a topic of conversation at a smaller gathering in Knapp Hall before Ms. Steinem’s lecture.
Many of those there said they were disappointed Barack Obama hadn’t chosen Hillary Clinton as a running mate and most expressed frustration that Governor Palin was being seen as “good enough.”
“Just because she’s a woman?” said Gail Schaeffer, a Blenhein native and both a former state Assemblywoman and Secretary of State who remembered meeting Gloria Steinem while she was working on the late Bella Abzug’s United States Senate campaign at the start of her own political career.
“It’s thrilling to have Gloria Steinem here, but it’s a little frustrating that 30 years later, we’re still having the same conversations.”