Gloria Steinem may be 82 years old, but she’s still in full-on go mode. In a new interview with The Guardian, she said she’s in “full-on revolt” against Donald Trump and all that comes with his impending presidency, riding the “new burst of feminist energy” that’s swirling around. And if you thought perhaps she’s go hang out at a retirement community somewhere at her age, think again. “I’m going to live to 100,” she said. “I’m never going to retire. Would I retire from life? This is my life!”
Most recently, Steinem has taken to the streets of New York City to protest Citibank’s support of the Dakota Access Pipeline, as TheGuardian reports. She’s also an active tweeter and uses her celebrity to lead other women activists to the forefront. “My job is to bring people up,” she said. “I almost never speak [at functions] alone, I bring people with me so they become better known. I try to do only what I can do. But sometimes I am the only person who can get someone on the phone. Sometimes you need to send a signal to people who would otherwise not know the names.”
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As to whom, exactly, these new leaders are, Steinem name-checked the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Ai-jen Poo, and the founders of Black Live Matters, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. “Ai-jen Poo organizes household workers, health care workers, food service workers that is part of a women’s ‘pink-collar ghetto,’ as we say, and it’s a union movement like the ‘30s that’s rising up, going state to state to get women covered by the labor laws,” Steinem said. She also commended Black Lives Matters’ nonviolent core and “spontaneous but effective” organization, The Guardian reported.
Steinem dispensed with the myths that millennials are more interested in “slacktivism” than rolling up their sleeves and taking action and that young women eschew the term “feminist.” Nope, Steinem said: “I had to wait for some of my friends to be born, but they are there and they’re younger than my blue jeans,” she said.
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And if anyone was going around in La La Land before Trump was elected claiming that we had moved past racism and sexism, they’re dead wrong, Steinem added, and it’ll be much harder to deny such things going forward. “I suspect many fewer people are going to tell me we live in a post-racist, post-feminist world now,” she said. “I have never in my lifetime seen a president who was such an egotist. He’s a sociopath, a racist, a sexual predator. There are great dangers because he is dealing with heads of state,” she said.
In conclusion, Steinem quoted the opening of the Constitution, which reads, “We, the people,” not “I, the president,” as she pointed out. “He’s not my president,” she said. “I’m not going to leave the scene — are you kidding?”
Gloria Steinem, mic drop.
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