Yesterday, Gloria Steinem, 92, died.

We “second-wave feminists” are exiting this plane.

Which pulls me back into remembering . . .

1964. I was married to Patrick, who was pursuing his MA in Architecture from Harvard. Not quite 22 years old, with two small sons, we had just arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was, as usual, in the doldrums. What had become of my life? It was obviously not my life; pregnancy had “forced” me to marry (given my then allegiance to strict Catholic upbringing), and basically, I personally saw no future that was actually mine. I was a functionary, period.

Enter Nancy, the wife of another Harvard student, classmate of Patrick. She and I began to have coffee together, in the mornings at my kitchen table with a view of the Charles River, 20 stories below. I could and sometimes do, date the beginning of my real life to those morning coffee dates with Nancy.

It didn’t take long before we were speaking intimately, finding ourselves digging deeper and deeper, divulging personal feelings about our lives, the direction they were taking, our mutual frustration. Indeed, we were, without consciously realizing it, beginning to see our lives sociologically, in terms of the “roles” we were playing.

Note: we weren’t “blaming” men. That way of twerking the situation, and the inevitable politization, polarization, was NOT what we had in mind. Our men were in “roles” too. And, likely, none of us, male or female if we really looked deeply, were happy about it.

I had never thought about “roles” before! Nor had Nancy.

One might say now, that we were actually seeing how we were “plugged into the matrix.”

Or: one might say that we were seeing, getting an actual perspective on, the “framework,” the “overton window” through which we perceived the external world.

Get it? This was a HUGE DEAL. Anytime we step outside a limited frame, to notice the frame itself, we open to infinity. Or we can. But very people realize this. It’s too scary. So most people just place each frame within another larger one. But what if, instead, we use that opening to let go of limits of any kind?

 

Glorida Steinem was one of the pioneers who played a role for us. But Betty Friedan, at least for me, her book, The Feminine Mystique, was my own personal wake-up call.

Her femous remark, “the problem that has no name,” haunted me. I read this book before we landed in Cambridge, while we were living in the D.C. area, right after it was published, in February 1963. I was still completing my B.A., had one child already, with another on the way.

There was no one, I repeat, no one, with whom I could discuss this “problem.” I was alone, and desperate for company.

 

My morning coffees with Nancy, in 1964, without our realizing it — all we knew was that we were so glad to connected in a real way, stripping off the masks — were among of thousands of tiny, but it turned out, extremely fertile seeds that evolved into “the women’s movement.”

Our two-person connection was soon joined by “consciousness-raising” groups everywhere.