Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem

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This is fresh air. I'm David Beancoolie. Gloria Steinem, the writer, activist and feminist icon, died Wednesday in her New York City home. She was 92 years old. Steinem was the voice and often the most identifiable face of women's liberation for more than half a century. She wrote a magazine article in 1963 called "A Bunny's Tale"

for which she went undercover as a cotton-tailed cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article about the showvinism and work conditions there caused a stir and set Gloria Steinem on a path towards both activism and publishing. She was an early contributor to New York magazine where she wrote the political column "The City Politics." Within a decade in 1971, she and fellow feminists gathered to launch another publication, Ms. magazine,

the first glossy national magazine to be created, owned and operated by women and targeted

at increasingly self-aware women of the 70s. It proved widely popular and hugely influential, and so did over the decades, Gloria Steinem. Politically, she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus, along with Bella Abzog, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chism and others, to fight for the equal rights amendment and encourage more women to run for public office. And she continued to write essays, articles, books, and was quoted as saying,

“"Riding is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."”

She wrote nearly a dozen non-fiction books. Today, we're going to remember Gloria Steinem by listening back to some of her conversations with Terry Gross. The first is from 1987. At that time, Steinem was celebrating the 15th anniversary of the publication of Ms. magazine. Gloria Steinem, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you. You had already worked in for several magazines as a journalist. Why did you think it was important to have a magazine

written by and devoted to women? Well, first because even before I began to think about anything

that might be called feminism or to question the structures that women encountered, I and lots of women could not write about political subjects for the existing magazines. We were thought to be the experts on food, makeup, babies, and celebrities, but that was pretty much it. Though I brailed against it as as many other women did, perhaps not hard enough in retrospect, but at least we tried. It really didn't budge very much. Then after we began to

realize that there was a reason why women felt connected to other discriminated against groups and kind of identified with the underdog because we were also underdogs and there began to be a women's movement. Then the magazine said, "Well, you know, we published our article on feminism last year or if we're going to write one article saying that women are full human beings. We'll have to publish one right next to it saying they're not in order to be objective." So it became

more and more clear to lots of us that we could not either write what we wanted to or read or edit what we wanted to in the existing magazines. So we started to meet and discuss whether or not, you know, a magazine might be possible. Did you find two that a lot of male editors thought that it was just too specialized, too narrow? It's right about issues like abortion or equality for women. You know, because all of the readers wouldn't be interested in it. No, absolutely.

And that was true on the left end on the right. You know, you would find, I'm sorry to say, is because I have much more affection for them, but it would find left men, editors who would say, well, you know, abortion is too controversial and we can't divide the left quote unquote with this kind of argument. Of course, it was actually much more popular as an issue than anything they were talking about, but still, you know, that just wasn't serious in their view.

“I mean, when I think about the life of the magazine, I think partly about the fact that”

everybody said after the first issue, well, they've said everything they have to say,

what is there to talk about besides childcare and welfare as a woman's issue and, you know, a few other things, but that's it, you know, now what? I mean, so actually the movement and the magazine has been being pronounced over ever since the, well, actually the first story that I know of that cover story, pronouncing the women's movement over was 1969 before the magazine ever started. Well, it was pretty premature. I'm wondering, what did you think the state of feminist coverage

was in the mainstream media in the early '70s and late '60s? It was mostly ridicule, really,

guy from the New York Post, who was actually covering the demonstration against the Miss America contest, and though nobody ever burned anything, although they did threaten to burn, uh, I don't know, a stand-up had a dust mop, an apron, they put all this stuff in a dust bin on the boardwalk,

they were going to burn it, including it broke, but they never did, because they couldn't get a fire

permit. I mean, this is, you know, we were just much too dust all right, but nonetheless, he picked up, he couldn't resist the illiteration and, and that was symbolic of the kind of of ridicule, really.

“I think that women's organizations and publications, functions on two levels, especially at the”

beginning, one was that the content was going to be oriented toward women, and the other was this kind of utopian sense, that with women at the controls, it was going to have a different structure, a different sense of power and hierarchy than their male run counterparts had. Did that happen at Ms. Magazine? Did you have a sense of, you know, what the utopian women's run magazine was going to be like? And I'm talking about, we did. And power structure, we did, but it wasn't totally, it was,

it was somewhat wrong, but not totally wrong. Uh, for instance, when we started out, I mean, an example of our naivety was that we sat around the rate of us, and we sat around and we fixed

each other's salaries, basically. Well, first, no, the real utopian thing was that we thought we

should all have the same salary. But it soon became clear to us just from just knowing each other's lives, that that was not possible. Some of us were supporting children, and some were not, some, you know, had, we're older, and had been earning, you know, higher salaries in the past, and so, so we did fix each other's salaries, but we took three things in mind. One, what their need was, to what our experience was, and three, how important we were to the life of the magazine itself.

What we did do, though, was to try to, uh, and something we've still maintained to make sure that the

“top salary was no more than three times the lowest salary. So, you know, I think, in a way that's,”

that's a little microcosm of, of the, both the idealism and the realism, that is, okay, no, we

couldn't all earn the same salary, but yes, we could substantially change the way the money was distributed, so that the top was three times the bottom, which is very different from other magazines where the chief editor may earn, you know, 20,000 bucks or more, and the secretary or in 10, you know, I mean, at least we'd narrowed the gap a lot. Um, did you go through this phenomenon that when you, um, formed this magazine with other women, that male colleagues of yours, male journalists,

assume that what you did all day, we sit around and talk about men, complaint bitterly about men. Yeah, you're right, you're right. I, I, I hadn't thought about that in a long time, but you're completely

“right. I remember somebody saying to me at one of the, uh, network CBS, I think that whenever”

three or four women had lunch together, that it made all the men nervous because they thought we were, you know, planning, uh, you know, midnight castration parties or something, I don't know. And I, I think that's true, you know, it, it's so threatening, oddly threatening for a few women to be, to be together. I do think that that's diminished a lot. One of the early sayings in the women's movement was the personal is political,

and I wonder if that still has the same resonance for you now that it did in the late 60s. It really does. I think in some ways we're only, you know, how you learn something intellectually before it gets to you emotionally sometimes. I think it's just getting to us emotionally now. How is it getting to you emotionally now? Well, I, I guess, uh, I mean, this may sound strange, but I'm just beginning to realize that I, I need to do some of the things that that I have been

saying should be done. In other words, I've been telling women, for instance, or trying to help women at a totally know how to manage the money to save money. Have I done this up to now? No, absolutely not. I mean, at no point have I had enough money to last more than a month or two? I don't think because I, I was just having much, much better time giving it away, but also, which is, I think, a positive reason, but also just because I didn't feel comfortable

exerting that kind of control over over money. I hadn't internalized the message myself. Your grandmother was a suffragist and a delegate to a big international convention back in 1908.

and I believe he left your mother and you when you were pretty young. So, was there any feminist

“legacy passed on from her for the time? No, there really wasn't. And I feel bad about that because”

both it, because it caused my mother to lead a less strong life that she might have otherwise and because it caused me to waste a lot of time rediscovering the wheel, but also because it means that our lessons of today can be forgotten too. My grandmother after the vote was achieved stopped being active in the way that, you know, many suffragists did out of exhaustion, out of lack of self-respect, out of, you know, I don't know why, but she did. So, by the time I was born,

she was not active and since she died, when I was very little, I never knew really,

and my family kind of inadvertently concealed what she had been up to. I mean, they would tell me how she was a wonderful woman because she founded the first vocational high school in Toledo. And she raised four sons and she kept a kosher table and so on, but they didn't tell me that she was this, you know, kind of raging feminist who marched in the streets and ran for the school board on a coalition ticket by the anarchists and the socialist kind of conveniently forgot that part.

But were they embarrassed by it? I don't know. It wasn't conscious on their parts exactly,

“but it was, I think it just wasn't socially good to have done this. So, they just, they didn't”

exactly conceal it, but they didn't talk about it. So, it wasn't until a nice feminist and Toledo wrote a monograph about my grandmother and sounded to me that I had any idea of the scope of her activities. You said that this word you in a way, because I mean, that other families or other women can forget what happened before, is that what your afraid is happening in the quote post-feminist period? No, I don't think, I mean, that only began to happen after a century and we're only

you know, 25 years ago into this and it is not post-feminist, no matter what the New York time says, it's just that young women, if the young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem. And of course, they will, you know, get educated by the world and by, by, you know, what they meet in the labor force and when they have children and so on. Today, we're remembering Gloria Steinem, the writer, publisher, activist, and feminist icon

who died Wednesday. She was 92 years old. At this point, we'll hear from an interview with Terry from 2015. At the time, Gloria Steinem had just published her memoir, which was titled My Life on the Road. Gloria Steinem, welcome back to Fresh Air. I want you to start by reading the dedication of your new book. This book is dedicated to Dr. John Sharp of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of

the woman. Took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a 22-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate,

“he said, you must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second,”

you will do what you want to do with your life. Dear Dr. Sharp, I believe you who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death. I've done the best I could with my life. This book is for you. Thank you for reading that dedication to your new book.

When did you first speak about your abortion? The amazing thing was that it took me so long

there was no women's movement. It was supposed to be a secret women didn't share in the same way. So it wasn't until many years later after New York Magazine had started and I had gone to cover an abortion speak out held in a church downtown in New York City. Suddenly, I heard other women standing up and talking about what it was like to have to go out and seek an illegal abortion. This was actually an alternate hearing to one that the New York State Legislature was holding

on the liberalization of abortion on New York State. This was before the Supreme Court ruling. And a group of early feminists had just said, "Wait a minute, you know, in New York in the legislature they asked 14 men and one none to testify. You can't make this up." Right. Let's

New York Magazine listening to women tell their stories that were tragic and ludicrous and every human emotion all wrapped into one. And suddenly I thought, "Wait a minute, you know, I had an abortion and actually one in three American women had needed an abortion at some time in her life." So why is this illegal? And why is it dangerous? And it's the kind of revelation that comes from people just telling the truth and discovering you're not alone.

So is this book this dedication the first time you mentioned the doctor's name who performed

your illegal abortion in England? It is the first time I mentioned his name. And why you decide why did you decide it was okay now to mention his name? Well first of all he was quite old at the time, so he clearly could no longer be alive no matter what. Secondly, the laws have changed our understanding. It just seemed to me that it was time to say thank you. Do you often wonder what

“your life would have been like? Had you not had the abortion and had you had a trial at that age?”

You know, I don't know what would have happened. I had been doing all the foolish things that we then did, like writing horseback throwing ourselves downstairs, you know, all kinds of things in the hope. Well, I was definitely right there, did you throw yourself downstairs? Yeah, kind of, I did. And I, you know, I am the most cowardly person you can imagine. So physically speaking, but I did. I kept thinking that somehow, you know, I could, I don't know what I

thought. I was desperate. I really was desperate because, you know, I just knew that if I went home and married, which I would have had to do, it would be to the wrong person, it would be to a life that wasn't mine, that wasn't mine at all. Did you hurt yourself throwing yourself down the stairs? No, you know, you're quite resilient at 22, right? I didn't. No. You spent half of your life on the road. You're still on the road a lot. You grew up on the road.

Let's talk a little bit about your very eight typical childhood. Your mother was often incapacitated

“by depression. Can we call it depression? You know, I, I don't know what to call. I think”

her spirit was broken. You know, she before I was born, had to give up everything she loved and cared about. And she was depressed. She got addicted to tranquilizers. You know, I don't, I don't think there was any, when I first wrote about her years ago, I was surprised that people would say

to me, do you fear this was hereditary? And I was shocked. And I always said only if patriarchy

is hereditary, because I just think her spirit was broken. Your father, until you were 10, during the summer, ran a dance pavilion that he created. Would you describe what your father did summers? This was a little lake in southern Michigan called Clark Lake. He had built a kind of long, big pier with part of a covered part of it uncovered over the lake. And on weekdays there would be sort of canned music and a jukebox, and on weekends, a band then the big bands

of the 30s and 40s used to travel the country in the summertime and a bus. And so we would get some famous bands sometimes, Wayne King and Jovanudia. I mean, names, I don't know, people know any more. And this, this was his dream. And he, you know, he created a kind of magical place.

“So what was it about being there, or about being with your father, their broken mother spirit?”

It just wasn't hers. Well, let me describe what she had been doing before long before I was born. She was a pioneer newspaper reporter and journalist and actually editor, which was extraordinary. But it was an era in which she at first had to write under a man's name in order to get published. So, you know, she was a real pioneer and she loved it. She adored it. At the same time, she was married to my father, a wonderful kind, charming, utterly irresponsible man.

So there were always money troubles and, you know, lots of difficulties. She had my sister,

in love with a man at work and had grown up believing that you could not divorce, you could not

“change. She had a girlfriend who wanted to come to New York with her, where she could try her”

hand at being a journalist. You know, she had all these aspirations. She just couldn't make it work. She had a, what was then called a nervous breakdown, which meant she was in a sanatorium for a year or two. I'm not sure. And there she got hooked on an early form of tranquilizer. Gloria Steinem, speaking to Terry Gross in 2015. The author, columnist, publisher, and women's rights activist, died Wednesday at age 92. After a break, we'll hear more of their conversation,

and critic at large John Powers reviews "Coyote Versus Act Me," the comedy film based on the classic Warner Brothers cartoon character. I'm David B. and Cooley, and this is fresh air. This message comes from the center for U.S. voters abroad foundation. U.S. citizens live travel and serve all over the world. But wherever they are, they can stay connected to home through voting. All U.S. citizens abroad may request an absentee ballot to vote in the 2026 election,

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Instead of scrolling mindlessly, engage mindfully with the NPR app with a mix of on-demand news stories from the station and your favorite podcast you can relax without shutting off your brain down low the NPR app today. This is Frishare, I'm TV critic David B. and Koolie. Today we're remembering Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon who died Wednesday at age 92. Let's get back to her interview with Terry from 2015, the year Steinem published her memoir

My Life on the Road. So getting back to this life that you had as a child, your mother spirit was broken was often hard for her to get out of bed. Your father created this wonderful dance pavilion summer. But then when the summer was over, the family would move into a van and drive south and basically live, when I say a van, I should say trailer, I suppose. And then the family would live in the trailer for the duration

until the following summer. You write that you never started out with enough money to complete the

trip. Your father would buy antiques and then sell them to antique dealers. You know, buy them at country auctions and then sell them to antique dealers at higher prices to fund your trip south. How did you like being a dinner at like that? I suppose the two things happen at once when your child one is that you just accept as normal whatever is around you. And the other is that you go to the movies and you see kids over your classmates because I would go to school till

it got cold to Halloween or something who are living a different way and you want to be like them, you want to be like the other kids. It never for a moment occurred to me that they might end be me. So I both accepted it and hoped that my real parents would come find me and take me to a house with a picket fence and a pony. I mean, that's the degree of realism and fantasy. So you weren't in school for those years that your family was on the road. How did you learn to read

and do basic math? Well, I'm not sure I've ever learned to do basic math. But I learned to read just because my family had lots and lots of books, especially my mother, you know, read all the time. My memory is that I learned how to read from ketchup bottles and labels and

“billboards along the highway. I don't know. I'm not sure. But I don't remember not knowing how to read.”

Was it legal for you to not be in school? No. I'm sure it was illegal and my mother always said

that if the true officer showed up, she would use her teaching certificate. The fact that it

herself, I don't know how impressive it would have been. But anyway, but no true and officer ever showed up. How did your father's sense of money that you could start the trip without having enough money to complete it and just kind of buy and sell things to fund the family? How did that affect

“your idea of money and the security that you need or don't need from money?”

It felt insecure. However, I must say that unlike a lot of kids, I always had a

enough to eat. I always had shelter. I always had parents who loved me. So I had security in a lot of ways. But my father's philosophy was he didn't want to know what was going to happen tomorrow because if he didn't know it might be wonderful, as he said. So I have to say it prepared me very well to be a freelance writer and never to have a real salary. Your parents separated when you were 10 in 1944 and you had to take on a lot of responsibility for your mother at a young age.

What were some of the things you had to do for her when you were still a child yourself? Well, it depended on, you know, on the ups and downs of her moods, but I would make her meals

or the child's idea of a meal. And I kind of always worried about what I would find when I

came home from school, you know, because she might be really depressed or she might have retreated into another world or she might be convinced that a war was happening outside the house and be wandering around in the street. You know, talking to other people whose parents were say alcoholics and who also kind of didn't know what they would find when they came home has made me realize that it's not, I mean, it's hopefully uncommon, but it's certainly not unique

my experience. She was called the crazy lady of the neighborhood once you had a neighborhood.

“What was your reaction to that and didn't make you think of her differently than you did before?”

No, I don't, I didn't make me think of her differently. She was, she was someone how can I say, I mean, she was a loving, wonderful woman who recited poetry by heart and was, you know, certainly super loving toward me, but sometimes she was just in another world and I didn't know when that would happen. I was still convinced that your mother was suffering from patriarchy as opposed to a mental illness of some sort, bipolar depression. No, I am because later on after

I was in college and therefore my sister, my older sister, was taking care of her and discovered that she just couldn't do it and keep her job. So she found a very good mental hospital where my mother was for a couple of years which should have happened probably long before and I asked the

“doctors there, the very expert doctors there, what was wrong and they said she had an anxiety neurosis”

and I said would you say her spirit was broken and they said yes, you know, I mean, she, I don't think there was anything organically wrong. She did get hooked on tranquilizers and that became part of the problem, not the solution. What was it like when you started school after you were 10, having not been in school before, whereas all the other kids in school had been in school before. I had been somewhat in school because I would go till it got cold, you know,

so I'd been every year, I'd been a couple of months in school, I kind of knew what school was,

but when I went for my first year, I discovered a, I didn't know how to do long division,

I didn't know the multiplication tables, although I'd been in many states, I had no idea what the map looked like. It was a big deficit, I'm not sure I've ever made up for, but I had a huge vocabulary because I'd been reading all the time, grown up books, kids books, everything. And I soon learned two things, one that that could compensate in a lot of ways and get me through school, and the other was that I shouldn't indulge in this enormous vocabulary too much,

because it was seems strange to the other kids. Gloria Steinem, speaking to Terry Gross in 2015. More after a break, this is fresh air. This message comes from the center for U.S. voters abroad foundation, U.S. citizens live, travel, and serve all over the world, but wherever they are, they can stay connected to home through voting. All U.S. citizens abroad may request an absentee

no matter how far away you are. Visit register abroad.com to get started.

“This week on the NPR Politics podcast, Democratic Socialists are having a moment. What's their goal?”

The goal being to eventually reline the Democratic Party to perhaps someday develop an independent party, but we recognize that in the United States they're just as a two-party system. How Democratic Socialists are staking out political territory. This week on the NPR Politics podcast. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's interview from 2015 with Gloria Steinem. The writer, publisher, activist, and feminist icon died Wednesday.

She was 92 years old. Do you remember the moment when you first realized women's rights was a legitimate issue, along with all the other rights that you were interested

in fighting for? You know, the amazing thing is how long it took me, actually.

I mean, there was no, at least to me, there was no visible women's movement. So I thought I just had to function within the system as it was, and I identified with everybody else who was

“having a hard time. I think women often do that without knowing that it applied to us too.”

But I owe it to the women who held that hearing on abortion, for instance, or you know, who had been inside the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam movement. And even in those movements that we utterly loved, still were not treated equally. And so had understood that there needed to be an additional women's movement. How did it redefine you to know that as somebody at the forefront of the women's movement, you were going to be an example

of what you were fighting for. And that the choices that you made were going to be public choices. I didn't really think about that because it seemed to me was the whole idea was the ability

to make our own choices. So I never felt that I had to behave in a certain way that was

subject to outside dictates. I thought the whole point was that we were able to use our own talents and do what we wanted. So I didn't feel inhibited by it in any way. Because you spent half of your life on the road, you've had a very ambivalent relationship to home. You read that it took you a really long time to create a comfortable home for yourself. And part because you were on the road all the time and you grew up on the road until you were 10. What point in your life did you

“create a home that was truly a comfortable place, a more of a nest that was a good place to return to?”

Really only after 50. I had buried in my head this idea that you only made a home for husband and children. I didn't see a lot of women making a permanent home for themselves.

I didn't think that way. And also I was on the road so I was always in a living out of suitcases

and cardboard boxes when I was at home. And even though I now to this day live in the same apartment that I did then, it was more like a storage place than an apartment. It was only after I was 50 that thanks to dear friends who came and helped me to unpack my cardboard boxes and another friend who explained to me how to make beautiful colors on the wall and took me around to auction places to buy things that I love. She said, "Only by what you fall in love with because if the same

person falls in love with all these things they'll fit together. Don't worry about it." I remember going out with her to buy antique sheets. It was orgasmic practically to the pleasure of buying antique sheets. So I began to make a home nest for myself and I take such pleasure in it. I think in general as a culture, we tend to think there are two choices settling down or traveling and actually you need both. You need a nest, birds need a nest and they still fly. So it took

me a while that it wasn't either or it was both. I interviewed several times on fresh air in the past and I want to play an excerpt of our interview from 1992. So this was 23 years ago? Yeah, that's shocking. Right. And one of the things you talked about was you were looking

what you said about that. So again, this is from 1992, Gloria Steinem, looking back and having that lump back to me and how it affected her life. It made me realize several things. One was this may sound strange if I tried to say it short. But that actually I wasn't, I was less

afraid of dying than of aging or not of aging exactly. I didn't know how to enter the last third

of life because there were so few role models. Because when I first heard this diagnosis,

“first I thought ironically, oh, so that's how it's going to end. And then I thought to myself”

as if it was welling up from the deepest part of me, I've had a wonderful life. And I treasure that moment, you know, it it mental out to me. But on the other hand, it also made me realize that in this culture women, we know how to be in the central plateau of life. And I'd been there a terrifically long time because I'd become a grown-up too early because my mother being an invalid. So from about 10 to 52 or so, I'd been in this central plateau. Now I was entering a whole new place. It was

like falling off a cliff because I couldn't see enough people ahead of me. You know, in the last two or three years of really, how shall I say, of kind of paying more attention to my own inner life.

I've realized that this aging in the last third of life or whatever is a new country. I now actually

feel excited about it because because you as Carolyn Heilbrin has pointed out so brilliantly in writing a woman's life, women become ourselves after 50. You know, we leave behind this female impersonator role and drop a lot of baggage and really become much more at true selves. You know what I find particularly interesting about hearing you thinking about about the latter

“part of your life is that I think for a lot of women is the end of your life where you're supposed”

to be punished for the freedoms that you've taken during the first parts of your life. You know, like if you've decided to be independent or not be married or not have children or something, you're punished for that in the end because you're supposed to look forward to an all-dayage where you're lonely, you're alone, there's no one to be with, no one to take care of you. I mean, I think that's been really instilled in all of this.

Yes, it's sort of the secular version of Heil. And like the religious version of Heil, it has nothing to do with real life. Okay, that was glorious, don't I'm on fresh air in 1992 and I just did the math and I think you were 58 when that was recorded. So, thank you for playing that because it's fascinating

“to listen to your earlier self- thing. Yeah, so just what you said then still ring true?”

Yes, it does. And I realized that I realized more now that I'm past that stage, that 50 was a very difficult birthday because it was the end of the central years of life. But 60, which I was just entering and when I was speaking then, was like entering as I was saying a new country. And that means that all the demands of gender that spread from something like 12 to something like 50 and are something of a prison sometimes are gone and suddenly you're free.

Here's my comparison now. Remember when you were 9 or 10 and you were this independent, little girl climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want, I know what I think." And so that was before gender descended for most of us. As Carol Giligan has pointed out in her work. After 50, theoretically, according to society, had kids raised them. So, your gender role is over. And ironically, I found by 60, you're free again. So, you're the same person you were at 9

or 10 only now. You have your own apartment. You can reach the light switch. You know, hopefully have a little money so that you can, you know, do what you want. There is, as I was saying,

then, of a whole different country after 60. But you were never tied to those gender roles anyways.

You didn't need to be-- Well, we're all tied to those gender roles. I mean, I don't think they're-- But it's not like you had the children who were now out of the house. So now, like, you have that true. That's true. No, that's true. It wasn't tied to the life cycle of a child, but it was tied to hormones and sexuality and affairs and how you looked and none of us escapes this completely or nor should we escape it necessarily. What is being-- in your 80 symbolized, do you know? If you told us a little bit

am because I'm trying to make myself believe it. I mean, 81 is an age that I think is someone else's age. You know, it's quite bizarre. And part of it is, I think, because we don't have role models of people going ahead of us. I don't have a very few role models of women my age who are doing what I'm doing. And in fact, the people I work with every day and love and, you know, are my current chosen family in terms of numbers are probably, I don't know, at least 40 years younger than I am.

And even my friends from Mizz and so on are at least 10 years younger than I am. Gloria Steinem, it has been great to talk with you again. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Gloria Steinem, speaking to Terry Gross in 2015. Steinem died Wednesday at age 92.

“Her latest book and unexpected life is scheduled to be published later this month. Coming up,”

critic at large John Powers reviews, coyote versus acne, the newly released film in which will forte shares the screen with some classic cartoon co-stars. This is fresh air. This message comes from the Center for U.S. voters abroad foundation. U.S. citizens live, travel, and serve all over the world. But wherever they are, they can stay connected to home through voting. All U.S. citizens abroad may request an absentee ballot to vote in the 2021

six election and requesting yours is easy. Keep your connections strong no matter how far away you are. Visit register abroad.com to get started. This week on Newsmakers after more than a decade in comedy, I wasn't sure that we would get here.

“Robbie Hoffman is fearless. I had a small feeling I wasn't. And fully or herself.”

My landlord. Hello. You can go out and wash. Well, I'm not home now. I'm doing something. We plunge into comedy and success with Robbie Hoffman on NPR's Newsmakers. This is fresh air. The famous cartoon series featuring the roadrunner in Wiley, coyote was created in 1949. It has remained so popular. It's even spawned the new movie, coyote versus acne, which is now in theaters. Our critic at large John Powers says that it offers

many of the pleasures of the original cartoon while taking it in new and deeper directions.

Like most of you, I grew up watching cartoons. For me, the best and purest series was always

the roadrunner. It's true hero is not, of course, that smug BBBING bird. It's his perpetually

“thwarted pursuer, Wiley Coyote, who alone in the most stripped down of deserts,”

endures the endless futility of a back-it character. In fact, the character was created the same time as waiting for Gado. Scaming it in an apt, Wiley's so hell bent on catching the roadrunner that he keeps buying shuddy contraptions, rocket skates, self-guiding bombs, earthquake pills, from a corporation called Acme. Their misfires inevitably blow him up, clobber him with animals, or sent him plummeting off a cliff. The unreliability of these products

inspired a witty 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Fraser. Coyote V. Acme, in which Wiley Coyote sues Acme for damages. In turn, that piece inspired the terrifically entertaining new movie,

Coyote versus Acme, which has finally turned up in theaters after Warner Brothers in a controversial

Acme-esque move, tried to shelve the finished film in order to claim a text right off. Bending live action with animation, Coyote versus Acme takes Frazier's piece, and transforms it into a spoofing riff on the classic legal thriller. Think the verdict or Aaron Brockovich. But one steep in the surreal anarchy of Looney Tunes. The story begins when the fed up Wiley decides to take legal action and hires an Albuquerque lawyer Kevin Avery played by Will Forte.

Alas, the scruffy Avery proves to be a hangdog soul, who fears failure so much that he only takes on small cases and settles them for epitons. Luckily Avery's intern page, that's Lana Condor, is an idealist. She pushes him into filing a massive suit against Acme,

the world's most powerful company. Acme is run by the strutting tune, foghorn leghorn,

and represented by killer lawyer buddy Crane. That's John Cena, whose body seems to be bursting from his suit. Soon, Avery page and Wiley go out looking for evidence and encounter numerous

the incomparable bugs. Along the way, Team Coyote under its a sinister Acme project named after

“Cicifus, the mythic stone pusher whose story anticipates the Coyote's own futility. Over and over,”

Avery wants to throw in the towel. You understand why on the first day in court. After Buddy Crane's

confident opening remarks, Avery struggles to find a response, as Wiley Coyote goes nuts the site. Now, what did the defense say we're gonna argue? I mean, I know the answer to it. I know the answer. I'm not asking you a question. It is a question, but it's a question that I'm asking to me. Let me start over. Let me start over. Objection to my start. So the defense said that we were going to argue that the products are dangerous and that Acme is negligent and selling them. I do really agree

with all that. I mean, it's not fancy, but it's true. Of course, one of the pleasures of Warner Bros. cartoons was their imaginative delight in shattering the laws of nature, often violently.

“Wiley Coyote can get smushed by a steam roller, pick himself up, dust himself off, and inflate”

himself back to normal size. Coyote versus Acme serves up a slew of delirious gangs like this, several of them terrific, in which the flesh and blood characters face the same crazy universe as the tunes. Still, what works in a six-minute cartoon is exhausting in a feature film, which is why writer Sammy Birch and director Dave Green do something the old roadrunner cartoons

never did. They give their story a plot and a meaning and even some feeling. We watch avery develop a

spine. We see Wiley's wistful longing beneath his ahab like obsession with the roadrunner, and we recognize the existential bond between the coyote and the roadrunner, the chaser and chasey, whose lives depend for their meaning on the presence of the other. And needless to say, coyote versus Acme delivers a message about runaway corporate power, which may explain why viewers are enjoying it so much. Acme is the very archetype of today's mega-corporations that outsourced

jobs to cheaper countries, manufactured goods designed to last only until their warranties lapse. Force you to wait on hold to talk to an AI bot, and find it cost efficient to pay off occasional lawsuits like Wiley's, rather than change corporate practices. When the movie suggested the courts in Congress cow-tow to Acme's power, it's just saying what everybody knows.

Now what was always great about old Warner Brothers cartoons was their gleeful irresponsibility.

They were never sentimental or improving like Disney. And in this respect anyway, coyote versus Acme violates the tradition. The movie celebrates Wiley coyote's willingness to fight on, even in the face of constant failure. I don't know about you, but I have to love any movie that's clever enough to turn Wiley coyote into a role model. John Powers reviewed the film coyote versus Acme, which is now in theaters. On Monday's show, for Labor Day, singer and songwriter

“Rosanne Cash. When she was 18, her father, Johnny Cash, gave her a list of 100 essential country songs.”

Years later, she returned to it and released an album featuring 12 songs from that list. Hope you can join us. Fresh air's executive producer is Sam Briggs. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld and Adam Stanichewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced in edited by Phillip Smyers and Marie Baldenado,

Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Fayette Challenger, Susan Yucundee, Annabellman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wistler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seediness. Our social media video producer is Hillary Kissinger. For Cherry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Beanfield. How will a historically unpopular president navigate a mid-term election season that may leave

him with a lot less power? Stay caught up with the latest news with Trump's term, the podcast, where we curate NPR's coverage of President Trump and short episodes focused on a single story. Follow Trump's terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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