A lot of fun has been had this month at the expense of longtime American feminist icon Gloria Steinem. After decades of pointing out the drawbacks of marriage, the 66-year-old Ms. Steinem recently surprised and titillated the world by going off and getting married.
The media have naturally had a field day trawling through her life's works for the best anti-marriage quotes, the better to hold her up to ridicule. (There were some good ones, too: "Legally speaking, marriage was designed for a person and a half"; "You became a semi-nonperson when you got married.") They couldn't get over the irony of it, much as they have never gotten over the irony of feminist U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton sticking with her serial philanderer of a husband all these years -- even after the humiliation of the Lewinsky debacle. Ideological opponents of Ms. Steinem have put it more nastily ("She was always sort of desperately eager to get married, poor thing," said the editor of the conservative Women's Quarterly magazine), but the underlying point is the same: All that female-independence stuff is a pose, a smoke screen, a fantasy. Who can take it seriously now, if they ever did?
Ms. Steinem, for one, still takes it seriously. "Though I've worked many years to make marriage more equal, I never expected to take advantage of it myself," she deadpanned in a news release after the wedding. Interestingly, her fellow feminists seem to have had no trouble accepting that spin on the unexpected nuptials. There was some friendly ribbing and a few gasps, but on the whole, feminist opinion leaders from National Organization of Women President Eleanor Smeal to Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown have given their blessings.