Name: Gloria Steinem discusses new documentary and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett
Uploaded: 2020-10-26
Duration: 8 min 6 s
Description: Steinem invokes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - 'If the rulings of the court are not just, we have a duty to disobey them.'

 GLORIA STEINEM: This is the upside of the downside. [CHEERING] SPEAKER: We thought a quarter million people were going to come. And about 1.2 million people came. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: So much of this documentary, Not Done, kind of connects the threads of the past half decade or so, drawing these lines between the Women's March, the Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, and up through events as recent as the speech that Representative Ocasio-Cortez gave on the House floor. If you were to kind of thread that needle a little further back, looking back at your career and life experience over the past several decades, how would you extend that line? What pieces of your experience would you kind of connect through in a similar way as to how the documentary did or the events of recent years? GLORIA STEINEM: I just could carry the thread back further because the students at Cornell University coined sexual harassment as a phrase to describe what was happening to them on summer jobs. We at "Ms. Magazine" then did a cover story about sexual harassment, which caused us to be put off the newsstands and supermarkets because it was too controversial. [CHUCKLING] Then sexual harassment was written into a sex discrimination law. And there were two cases brought because of sexual harassment as sex discrimination by 2 Black women, and those cases were won. So you can see the progress. And I think that, given where I started, I just see the thread starting a little earlier, but it's the same thread. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: Absolutely. So given that it's the same thread, looking at the events covered from the past five years in this piece, which events to you kind of stood out the most as the ones that most directly continued that thread? GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I think the entire #MeToo movement has brought the issue of sexual harassment into the public sphere. And it's made it global, actually, because this movement is global. So what started with the coining of the phrase "sexual harassment" has now become a huge, huge global movement. And this is important because it's saying, basically, that women's bodies belong to ourselves. And that is revolutionary because we are the means of reproduction. And there has always been an effort to control reproduction and therefore to control women's bodies. So to simply make that statement that we are autonomous human beings and we get to decide what happens to our bodies has huge implications. It actually is the beginning of a deep democracy, not just a superficial one. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: You know, what has been going through your mind as you've watched the recent confirmation process for Amy Coney Barrett and the Supreme Court? GLORIA STEINEM: You know, it is really, really discouraging to see the power of a president who is fundamentally unelected. I mean, he lost the popular vote by a huge number, by 3 million. He's only there because of the accident of the electoral college, a kind of relic of history, which should be eliminated. So because he is accidentally there, then he is putting on the court someone who does not represent the majority opinion of Americans and certainly not of women. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: And what is at stake with the Supreme Court seat, especially as related to reproductive rights? GLORIA STEINEM: It makes it dangerous to simply state the right that we can control our own bodies because it gives the law a certain unjust control over women. And theoretically, this is a woman who supports that. But as Martin Luther King said, the rulings of the court are not just we have a duty to disobey them. And we will simply disobey the court. The court has not been with us in most of my life, but it had become more with us, and it's a tragedy to see it regress. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: What does that mean in the context of reproductive rights, the idea of disobeying unjust laws, especially for if you're talking about abortion? If you're just obeying the law that then comes with a degree of danger, what do you expect to happen if Roe v Wade is overturned? GLORIA STEINEM: Well, even when abortion was illegal, one in three American women had had an abortion at some time in their life, but with much more risk. Now it's one in four with much less risk. But nothing is going to keep women from trying to control our own bodies because it's too fundamental. But the tragedy is that especially for women with little access to services in their state, inability to travel to another state where the services are better, it's going to mean a lot of suffering. And it's going to mean that we, as a women's movement, will have to be organized to offer women in one state transport to another state, for instance, where they're able to exercise their rights. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: In the documentary, I think there is this phrase, "not done." And many of the women at the end of the show answered that question of what it means for them, but I don't think they showed your answer to that question in the final version. So what does that phrase, "not done," mean to you? GLORIA STEINEM: What it means to me is, are you kidding me? We are so not done. I mean, it's just-- I can't even contemplate the word "done." Because do women have control over their own bodies just on the question of giving birth or just on the question of physical safety? Do we have the same safety as at least as men do? No, and that's very fundamental. Are we representated at every level of government? No. I would just say we are way not done. EMMA HINCHLIFFE: What would you say to younger people who maybe were fighting for change and had that optimistic view and then were discouraged by the events of the past few years? Maybe it was their first time seeing something that seemed to them like real regression and real backwards movement. GLORIA STEINEM: I would just say, in a general way, that sometimes we get a case of the shoulds, what should I do, instead of just getting up every morning and saying, I'm going to do everything I can. Whatever that is, however small or large it is, I'm going to see every act I take as a platform for change. And finally, I would just say, it's fun. [CHUCKLING] There's nothing more exciting than being able to help make and to see positive inclusive change moving forward. It's way better. I mean, I want everybody to be paid well. But it is way more rewarding than putting money in the bank and seeing the numbers-- it is just infinitely rewarding. 

Steinem invokes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - "If the rulings of the court are not just, we have a duty to disobey them."

Gloria Steinem discusses new documentary and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett

Politics

Steinem warns of Barrett's potential rulings.