This Isn’t That Documentary: Gloria: In Her Own Words

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

As I said on Twitter, Gloria: In Her Own Words, the new documentary about feminist activist Gloria Steinem running exclusively on HBO this month, is a “precise” work on her life and The Second Feminist Movement (and what I mean by this is the mainstream Second Wave Movement) in the last 60+ years.

Dana Goldstein took the doc to task in The Nation for not addressing race and racism in the movement Steinem helped shape:

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 showing 1970s white feminists arguing that men’s only bars are the equivalent of Jim Crow lunch counters. Doesn’t that contention cry out for debate, for analysis—for something? We see Steinem appear alongside her 1970s “speaking partners,” the black feminists Flo Kennedy (pictured above–Ed.) and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, but we don’t hear much about how these women (who were so often overshadowed by the more famous Steinem) navigated their dual identies as women of color within the feminist movement.

Steinem notes that her own brand of feminism was more radical than that of her elders, women like Betty Friedan, who were concerned mostly with the plight of white, college-educated housewives. Yet there are no interviews with either Steinem or other movement veterans that reflect explicitly on the relationship between feminism and civil rights. We hear about how Steinem’s sexy good looks helped propel her to prominence, but not about how her whiteness helped make feminism seem less threatening. We also learn nothing about the sophisticated set of critiques women-of-color, such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, have long made regarding mainstream feminism: that its focus on abortion detracted from their own struggle for maternal rights and that the assumption that women represent a united interest group often downplayed the struggles of non-white women in overcoming racism.

The reason why I called this doc “precise” is because I didn’t expect it to be nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement…which was, in reality, notoriously short on analysis of race and racism as it functioned within it. When it was addressed, the rhetoric talked about white men and their race vis-à-vis “male privilege.” Some of the white women within that movement may have deeply empathized with and felt themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people of color—Steinem presents herself as such a person—but, as cravenly cynical as it seems, those struggles were also a media-friendly “hook” so people could grasp why women were fighting for, say, equal pay and the right to safe abortion. And, as critiqued again and again, loaded with white female privilege.

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