From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, September 3
BBC News — read the full story
Gloria Steinem said, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" — and she spent seventy years making sure we believed it. The feminist icon who founded Ms. Magazine and reshaped American consciousness around abortion rights, equal pay, and marriage equality has died at ninety-two in New York. She moved through the women's liberation movement not as a theorist... but as a presence, making the personal political in ways that still shape how we argue about power and dignity. Seneca has the first word today, then Marcus Aurelius.
Lucilius, the news reaches me of a woman who walked into the arena at thirty-four and did not leave it for sixty years. I think of Corsica , eight years watching the sea for a sail that never came, writing letters to a Rome that had forgotten me. She had no exile but the one she chose: the contempt of men who called her unnatural, the F.B.I. file, the sneers that she was too pretty to be serious, too serious to be loved. She answered each by staying. The soul that sees itself cannot be unmade by opinion. I wrote that once, from a sickbed where the breath came thin.
She proved it in committee rooms and protest lines, in the offices of a magazine she built because no existing one would carry... the truth. Ms. , a word that refused the husband's name. A small rebellion. The kind that outlives empires. We measure lives by the noise they make.
The crowd roars for the charioteer, then forgets his name before the dust settles... But the woman who teaches a girl that her body belongs to her , that lesson travels farther than any legion's march. It enters the bloodline. It becomes the water. I think of Paulina at Nomentum, reading my letters aloud while the fever broke. Some writings are not for the moment. They are for the daughter who has not...
yet been born. Write to me , what did you refuse to leave unfinished?
those who died long ago. 11. To these maxims add this other. Accurately define or describe every thing that strikes your imagination, so that you may see and distinguish what it is in naked essence, and what it is in its entirety; that you may tell yourself the proper name of the…
live. 28. Pain is either an evil to the body; and then let the body so declare it; or an evil to the soul. But the soul can maintain her own serenity and calm; and refuse to conceive pain as an evil. All judgment, intention, desire and aversion are within the soul, to which no ev…
a reasonable soul are: That she seeth herself; that she can order, and compose herself: that she makes herself as she will herself: that she reaps her own fruits whatsoever, whereas plants, trees, unreasonable creatures, what fruit soever (be it either fruit properly, or analogic…
some in a calm: the general differences, or different estates of things, some, that are now first upon being; the several and mutual relations of those things that are together; and some other things that are at their last. Their lives also, who were long ago, and theirs who shal…
are her own? Now the acts of the soul are movement towards an object or movement from it, desire, aversion, preparation, design (purpose), assent. What then is it which in these acts makes the soul filthy and impure? Nothing else than her own bad judgments ([Greek: chrimata]). Co…
A woman spends sixty years contending for what she calls justice. The empire calls it disorder. She writes, she speaks, she organizes, she endures the insults that attend any voice that refuses the assigned place. Ninety-two years. The body fails at last, as bodies do. The work does not. You have seen this shape, Marcus. At Carnuntum, the Quadi envoy demanded terms Rome would not grant.
He stood in the mud and named the treaty broken. The centurions laughed. He did not leave. Three winters later, the terms changed. Not because he persuaded them , because he outlasted their indifference. She founded a paper. She marched. She testified before senators who had already decided.
She lost more votes than she won. The law moved anyway, dragged by the weight of her refusal to stop naming the thing that was wrong. The opposition called her unnatural. They called her dangerous. They called her a disease in the body politic. The same words the Senate used for the Christians, for the philosophers, for anyone who claimed a loyalty higher than the state's convenience. You will find, Marcus, that the measure of a life is not whether the world bends. It is whether you kept naming the true shape of things when the world refused to bend.
Keep naming it.
those who died long ago. 11. To these maxims add this other. Accurately define or describe every thing that strikes your imagination, so that you may see and distinguish what it is in naked essence, and what it is in its entirety; that you may tell yourself the proper name of the…
for love between them? The eyes of the whole world were centered upon these two people. Helen Hinckley was called the great heroine of the age, and the press never tired of lauding her bravery in saving the life of the great Governor of Chihuahua, even at the peril of her own lif…
live. 28. Pain is either an evil to the body; and then let the body so declare it; or an evil to the soul. But the soul can maintain her own serenity and calm; and refuse to conceive pain as an evil. All judgment, intention, desire and aversion are within the soul, to which no ev…
a “Subject” on whom “Memory Fluid” was used, or one who believed in it and thought it to be the greatest discovery the world had ever known, and that through its use the world would be taught about and brought to see and to experience the highest laws of God. The fame of Julio Mu…
not unlike me now.” “And this, and this?” continued the lawyer. “This,” exclaimed the Plunger, “is a splendid photograph of my wife of long ago! Poor woman, how she stayed by me during my trouble, until death claimed her as his own. Ah; and this is the child we loved and who neve…
B.B.C. News carried the piece. She spent six decades in the arena... which is its own form of longevity that most movements don't survive. That's Old News for today.