Excerpts from an email interview with Gloria Steinem by Ammu Joseph

My hope is that this book might carry on the encouragement to travel and organise that I got almost 50 years ago in India by learning about Gandhi and by walking through villages with Vinoba Bhave's followers. They used to quote Gandhi: If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. When I went home, the civil rights movement proved this was true. Later, so did feminism which was and is almost entirely based on small groups of women organising locally.

A recent article quoted you saying that the on-the-road book is not a female genre. Could you elaborate upon the gendering of literary genres and spaces?
Women, or any "out" group, tend to be more numerous wherever there is less need for money or cooperation. That's why there are more women poets than playwrights, more women painters than architects, more women dancers than choreographers, more women actors than directors — and so on.

On-the-road books have been an especially "masculine" genre because the road was supposed to be too dangerous and disreputable for women. Even if a woman did get the courage to travel, she might not be accepted when she came home. The Hero's Quest was pretty much forbidden to women, and the Prodigal Son was a lot more likely to be celebrated than the Prodigal Daughter. That's beginning to change, but there is still a big imbalance in on-the-road writing.

In other literary genres, exactly same thing may be treated differently depending only on the gender of the author. If a woman had written Madam Bovary or Anna Karenina, for instance, those novels might have been called "confessionals" — or now "chick lit" — but because two guys wrote them, they were accepted as great literature.

A corollary is that male writers are allowed to create major female characters, but female authors are likely to be questioned when they create a major male character. In journalism, an article with a male byline is still more likely to be accepted as authoritative than the very same article with a female byline. There was a recent, great case of a major professional paper by a woman psychologist that was compared unfavourably by her peers to an earlier study written by her brother. It turned out that one male-to-female transsexual had written them both!

There is also the general truth that what happens to men is called "political," but what happens to women is called "cultural." That's a way of saying that men's status can be changed but not women's. Well, we're changing it anyway. Democracy can't exist without feminism.

What is the relevance of the relatively new Women's Media Center at this point, when the general perception is that women have arrived in the media and there has even been talk for some years about the apparent feminisation of media professions?
There are a lot more women employed in the media as a result of the women's movement, but rarely at decision-making levels. There's no shortage of terrific writers, editors, journalists, and scholars who report women's experiences — and thus present a more accurate story, whether it's about local health or globalised labour — but they're either in alternate media, or they're fighting to get a story past a white male mainstream boss.

What some people mean by "feminisation" is that salaries go down once a category of work is about a third female. What others mean is that, say, Oprah has become successful by telling stories about real people. Since many men have been taught that real peoples' stories are less important than statistics from the top, they resent this success and dismiss it as trivialising.

Currently, only about a third of news items — in print, broadcast, and Internet combined — cite any female source at all. After the terrorist attack of September 11th, the number of female authorities interviewed on US TV plummeted, even though the heads of all the relevant Congressional committees were women, and even though the only prosecutor to successfully prosecute a case of foreign terrorism in the U.S. was a woman. Instead, TV producers dug up retired generals who knew very little, all because terrorism is "hard news" and women are relegated to "soft news." How gendered is that?!

Even now, the Sunday morning TV talk shows that set the political agenda have nine times more male guests than female guests. On newspaper op-ed pages, the usual rule is that one female writer and/or one writer of colour is enough. Women are fewer than 10 percent of board members of major media companies, and only 3 percent of so-called "clout" titles-positions with the power to set budgets and make news decisions.

Yes, we got as far as tokenism, but nothing much has changed for a decade. For example, it's now okay to have a female "co-anchor" — a big change from the 1970s when TV executives said audiences would never accept "hard news" in a female voice — but the male is still the "anchor," not the "co." Not until late last year did we get the first solo female anchor of a major news show on American television, Katie Couric.

There's also the double standard. Because women on camera are still expected to be ornamental, they're about fifteen years younger than men. They also may be fired just as they become experienced and authoritative. That's why there's no female Walter Cronkite or Ed Bradley.

You can see why we started the Women's Media Center. It's a not-for-profit foundation composed of women media professionals who might not have been there ten or 20 years ago, and who now can band together to help get women into decision-making positions, and to create a bridge of media training and pitching stories to make the female half of the world more visible. We have space for briefings, press conferences, etc. And we have a website — www.womensmediacenter.com — with hotlinks to progressive women columnists, and original WMC reporting. Last spring, we broke the story of the abortion ban in South Dakota — which wouldn't have been overturned in the last election if it hadn't got national attention — and right now, we're running otherwise unreported stories, from a U.S. military rape of a 14-year-old and murder of her and her family in Iraq to women's access to sports.

The point is not only to get women jobs in the media, but to make the news more accurate and useful. Instead of stories about whether a starlet is pregnant or not, we need reports on the international crime of sex trafficking. Instead of a national security that's measured in fighter jets and nuclear weapons, we need one that's also measured in access to fresh water, education, jobs, contraception, health care.

How has the Center has been perceived and received by other women in media?
The most negative response came from women who'd been working in the media a long time. They thought we were just hitting our heads up against a male corporate wall, that it was hopeless, that stories featuring women would always be about sex, entertainment, consuming and reproducing. But even most of those women changed once they came to a lunch or briefing and felt less isolated. Women newer to the media had a more positive response. For example, we had a meeting of all the bookers for major news and talk shows. They were surprised to find that they were all women, their producers were all men, and they shared many problems in pitching stories. They learned they weren't alone, and also shared tactics.

Could you expand upon the concept behind GreenStone Media — to meet the "unserved need on radio for innovative, topical, relevant and entertaining programming of particular interest to women?"
It was women radio professionals who saw the window of opportunity for a new kind of programming. The ultra-rightwing came to power in the U.S. mainly through religious TV shows, corporate cable networks like Fox News, and AM talk radio. Because they made talk radio hostile, bombastic, full of yelling and extremism, it eventually turned off most women listeners, and many men, too. Then FM radio music stations began to do less well, too, because people started to get their music from Ipods, downloading and so on. This created an opportunity on both AM and FM — so-called terrestrial radio where 90 percent of listeners still are, though satellite radio is growing — for a new kind of talk programming.

That's what Greenstone Media (www.greenstoneradio.com), the first women-owned radio network, has created for national syndication: five full days of radio programming with two three-hour drive time shows, plus two other midday shows. It's entertaining, informative, respects its callers, and creates the feeling of an on-air community. Our slogans are things like: "This is a lecture-free zone," "Respect spoken here," and "As edgy as you can get with the kids in the car."

We've been very successful with the stations that switched to our programming, but they've been smaller markets so far. The people who buy shows are often conservative and 100 percent white guys, so the question is whether they will venture beyond what they're used to.

During these past couple of years, I've learned that radio is the most democratic medium. It doesn't demand literacy or expensive equipment or even electricity. For instance, it played a big role in the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia, a very poor and suffering country. I can imagine that a woman on a Native American reservation in the U.S., and one in a village in Kenya, could both get companionship and information from satellite shows accessed on crank-up radios. Radio can lessen power differences that computers and the Internet sometimes only increase.

I understand you and Jane Fonda were recently on a "Cooking with Feminists" show on The Colbert Report, discussing GreenStone Media with Stephen Colbert while baking an apple pie! What was that about?
Stephen Colbert does a spoof of the ultra-rightwing hosts on Fox News by pretending to be one of them, and then carrying their attitudes just a little too far. The "too far" in our case was to assume that two women, feminists or not, would want to do a cooking show. Jane and I had a great time with apples and pie making because we used it for funny little lessonettes in equality. It also showed that feminists have a great sense of humour, though I don't see how that could be news anymore. For me, it was also like a return to "That Was the Week That Was" where I once wrote political satire. I really enjoyed it.

I am curious about your involvement in various types of work relating to children and your obvious interest in children and child-related issues.
It's always seemed to me that the only form of arms control is how we raise our children. If our homes normalise violence, it will be normal in the streets and in foreign policy.

I've never understood why every course in political science doesn't start with family and childrearing: if we don't have democratic families, we will never really have democratic societies. If a child is raised to believe that a sister is inferior to a brother, if men are raised to believe they have to be in control and even violent toward their own wives in order to prove their "masculinity," then we've created a model of domination for races, classes and castes. We've also created the cult of masculinity on which militarism and terrorism are based.

Look at the childhoods of leaders. To say that Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein were all sadistically brutalised children — and that they then treated others as they had been treated — is not an excuse. After all, some people heal those wounds and then use their experience to help others. But it is a reason.

I think the answer lies in everyone completing the full circle of human qualities. Men will develop their full humanity — including empathy, patience, flexibility, cooperation — when they raise children as much as women do, just as women develop their full humanity — including daring, decisiveness, creativity, self-expression — when they are as responsible in the public sphere as men are.

What are your views on the media and journalism today?
Nothing is more important than democratising and breaking the distorting corporate, consumerist, militaristic hold on the media. We ought to start a reverse Peace Corps so people from so-called under-developed countries can travel and see the high environmental, health and violence price that people in over-developed countries have paid. The media romanticises what it wants to sell, so Hollywood — and probably Bollywood, too — tries to convince us that personal appearance, romance and possessions are the answer. The rest of the media publicises problems, poverty and violence as the only alternative.

The truth is that, in over-developed countries like mine, only the very rich can enjoy the healthy food, clean air, sense of self and leisure that still exists in many original cultures. At a minimum, the media needs to report solutions as much as problems, and stop pretending there are only two sides to every question when there are probably multiple views and possibilities.

The Internet is a populist hope for breaking that control, but right now, access to it is socially and economically limited, and its fact checking and accuracy are so undependable that media "brand names" are still more credible and popular than they should be.

What are your opinions on popular, if tiresome, terms like"post-feminism?"
It makes no more sense to say "post-feminism" than to say "post-democracy." We haven't achieved either. The author Erica Jong counted and discovered that Time Magazine alone has declared the women's movement dead 27 times. Anti-equality folks first said that feminism was against nature and unnecessary. Now they say it used to be necessary, but it's not anymore. It's just the current form of resistance.

The 19th and early 20th century wave of feminism lasted more than a century, and achieved in most countries a status for females as human beings and citizens, not chattel and legal possessions. Having earned a legal identity, the current wave is striving for legal equality. We're about 30 or 40 years into it, so we probably have at least 60 or 70 years to go. Then there will probably be other waves before we finally have cultures that don't determine human futures by the single difference of sex or race or ethnicity, but assume shared humanity and individual uniqueness.

What would you say are some of the key contributions of feminism and women's movements to life and society as we know them today?
I would say that a crucial contribution of feminism is to add reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right. Controlling women's bodies as the most basic means of production, the means of reproduction, is the origin of patriarchy; thus of domination and hierarchy. Women are reversing that process by seizing control of the means of reproduction, and restoring balance.

But perhaps the biggest contribution of feminism is to challenge and humanise the cult of masculinity — and the cult of femininity that supports it — which are the deepest causes of violence, as Olaf Palme always said, on this fragile Space Ship Earth.

A recent article quoted you saying that your No. 1 priority at the moment is "getting rid of George Bush, by any means necessary, short of violence." What is your take on the current political situation in the U.S., especially after the recent election results?
It feels as if we have pulled back from the brink of destruction, but the damage from six years of Bush & Company turning the country into a rogue state will be hard to reverse. We've got an electoral system in which about half of possible voters don't participate — partly because those who benefit make it harder to vote in the U.S. than in any modern democracy in the world. So his administration was put in power by about 30 percent of the country. We're going to have to repair that system, reform media that are so inadequate that 60 to 80 percent of the people who voted for Bush thought they were voting for the opposite of many of his positions, and also try to reverse the damage to other countries, to the international treaties we've broken - and much more.

But I'm a hope-a-holic — hope is a form of planning — so I feel much better now than I did before the election.

Hillary Clinton has now formally announced her intention to join the race to be the next President of the U.S. Who is likely to be more acceptable to the majority of voters there at this point: a black president or a woman president?
I think both Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama would make good Presidents, a hundred times better than Bush who had failed in every business before his election as Governor and, before his election as President, had been out of the U.S. only when he went to Mexico to party. He had every advantage and failed. Obama has had almost every disadvantage and succeeded. Hillary has survived being a woman and a wife in a patriarchy and also survived being the target of the ultra-rightwing for almost 20 years.

I also think that the majority of voters are more open-minded than the majority of power brokers, pundits and consultants in Washington. If the Presidency follows the pattern of other positions of power — say, on corporate boards — then an African American man will be accepted before any variety of women. But that's a big "if." What's more important to me is that we maintain our coalition of "out" groups: after all, Obama is a feminist and Clinton is anti-racist. Neither will win if we're divided.

What are your thoughts as you look back on your life so far? Do you have any regrets? What do you look forward to in the future?
I think we all have a habit of mind, whether it's living in the past, present or future. Mine is living in the future, so when people ask what my greatest accomplishment was, I always say, "But I haven't done it yet!" Given my age, they find that odd or amusing.

If I make myself think of the past, I don't have any major regrets except wasting time, continuing to do things I already knew how to do, and responding instead of initiating. My hopes for the future are writing much more, going deeper instead of wider, learning all that I can about original cultures, dancing more, and living to at least 100.

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