No Slowdown For Gloria Steinem

Feminist Leader, 71, Sees Progress – And Work To Be Done

(CBS)  In the 40 years that she's been speaking out, Steinem has seen tremendous change in the status of women. In 1972, only 10 percent of doctors were women. That number has grown to almost 30 percent. Four percent of lawyers back then also have grown to 30 percent. As for engineers, a fraction of one percent has become more than 14 percent. And for still more evidence of just how much our culture has changed, Steinem points to the mega hit TV show: "Desperate Housewives."

“’Desperate Housewives’ is funny," she says. “It has the word 'desperate' in front of it, which is a sign of progress. It certainly is enough to slow any movement into the suburbs.”

But Steinem says women still have a long way to go.

“There's a barrier that has moved. But there's still a barrier. So what used to be, you couldn't get a job, now you hit a ceiling after a few years. What used to be unequal marriage is now unequal after children are born. The barrier has moved, thank goodness. So there's more room back here that's liberated. But the barrier is still there to be pushed.”

What does she say to people who think the women's movement is dead?

“Look around. Buy eyeglasses. Open your ears!” she replies.

At a recent function at Yale University, young women seemed starstruck.

“She plants the seed - you can do this, you can change, look at things from a different perspective. And the world will open up,” said one student.

“You can say, ‘Wow, I am part of something. I am part of a movement,’ when I thought it was me and my girlfriends in a room. And so, I'm going to walk away tonight thinking 'Wow,’” said another student.

That hasn't silenced the critics who think the women's movement has lost momentum.

Does she think the women's movement has lost a lot of power in the last 30 years?

“No, but I think that we've lost a lot of elections,” she answers.

But isn't that the same thing?

“Not really. Let's make a distinction between public opinion polls and elections. Public opinion polls are very good on all the issues of special concern to women.”

A CBS News poll appears to bear her out. A full 65% of all American women today say they are feminists who believe in social, political and economic equality of the sexes.

Women have changed, and so has Gloria Steinem. The woman who once thought marriage was demeaning has had a change of heart.

Gloria Steinem got married to human rights activist David Bale. She wore jeans to the wedding, with a flower in her hair.

Did she shock herself a little bit?

“Oh, I did. Absolutely. Yeah. We shocked ourselves, both of us. Neither one of us thought that we wanted to get married.”

So what was it about Bale that made her say, 'I'm going to marry this guy'?

“It was something about me. I think. First of all, I was 66 years old. I was who I was. I no longer felt that I would have to give myself up in any way.”

After waiting so long to marry, she was not prepared for what happened just three years later.

Her face changes when she talks about that. Three years after she married Bale, she lost him.

“I haven't got to that yet, actually, to thinking about losing him,” she says. “I still see scenes in the hospital and things that happened to him in front of my face when I look at certain things.”

Bale died after a year of fighting lymphoma of the brain.

“Maybe you never make peace with it,” she says. “It just comes back. But it taught me an enormous amount. Even if I knew what was going to happen, I would have chosen to go through it with him.”

She said once that losing her husband made her understand the difference between sadness and depression.

“Yes, because people would say to me, aren't you depressed? And I realized that in depression, nothing matters. And in sadness, everything matters. It makes everything poignant.”

Today she lives alone, except for a stray dog that David and his son, actor Christian Bale, found on the streets of Los Angeles, and wonders, like we all do, where the time went.

“I can't believe it. It seems like someone else's age, not my age.”