Revolution from Within by Gloria Steinem

First published: 1992

Type of work: Social criticism

Form and Content

Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within locates the possibility for revolution in the psyche rather than in the ability to act decisively and independently in the world. Wherever she traveled, Steinem found that although women were acting in courageous, ambitious, and committed ways, they did not see that they were doing so. Steinem began to admit to her own feelings of self-doubt and emptiness. Through her personal experience and the personal experiences of others, Steinem located a crucial problem for contemporary women that accompanies the great expectations they hold for themselves: As they try to succeed in many roles, their self-esteem can be damaged by the ongoing expectations that they should fill those roles. After Steinem had written 250 dry, unsuccessful pages, Steinem’s friend, a family therapist, read the manuscript and commented that Steinem had a self-esteem problem. Yet Steinem had been named one of the ten most confident women in the United States. The coincidence made her even more convinced that women were in serious trouble.

To rewrite her book, Steinem added autobiographical elements and invited her readers to connect her stories with their own. Her approach reflects feminist consciousness: the movement back and forth between the personal and the political. Steinem has a political purpose for addressing self-esteem; she sees it as the basis of any real democracy. By locating strength in the self-belief, she draws connections between self-esteem and the ability to demand fairness and to change the hierarchical paradigms of the family, the nation, and even the world.

Steinem structures the book by first giving a detailed account of self-esteem. She relates not only her own parable (by this she means a personal anecdote from which more far-reaching generalizations can be made) but also a history of the notion of self-esteem that goes beyond Western culture to Egypt in 2,500 b.c.e., Hinduism, and the Upanishads. She introduces early on what will be a recurring theme throughout the book: the belief that there is a crucial core self that is a powerful part of human identity, one that needs to be recognized and liberated.

Because she locates this core identity in the child, one must, as a step toward self-healing, rediscover that unique child—a waiting true self. Hence, one must journey back to what one has lost, recover what that child experienced, and re-parent oneself in order to reclaim one’s most true, creative core. In the appendix is a “Meditation Guide” that can assist one in making the journey inward.

She follows with chapters that discuss education and the ways in which it undermines intellectual and interpersonal self-esteem. She advocates not only a change in institutional structures but also the revision of the very norms against which people judge experience. By giving a brief history of scientific “facts” that have been used to bolster social prejudices, she seriously calls into question modern measuring techniques that still rank individuals based on mainstream (white, male, middle-class, heterosexual) knowledge.

The book goes on to address issues such as women’s bodies, love, romance, and animal rights. Throughout, Steinem returns to the theme of authenticity. Beauty is the ability to decide what is beautiful within oneself, not how well one measures up to what is considered beautiful. Pleasure and creativity are expressions of the true self. Love exists when one is loved for an authentic self. Her message finally is that there is one true inner voice, and that by trusting it, one can stretch one’s abilities without sacrificing self-esteem.

Context

Revolution from Within appeared during a crucial year for feminism. Susan Faludi’s Backlash, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Feminism Without Illusions, and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth had also recently appeared in print. Women were talking again about what it means to be a feminist and what it means to be part of the feminist community. Because it came from one of the recognized leaders of the feminist movement, Steinem’s book caused a certain amount of consternation for feminist social critics. Nowhere in the title is the label “feminism” or “feminist” used. Instead, it purports to be “A Book of Self-Esteem,” and the revolution described involves an interior, psychic revolution, not the overthrow of oppressive sexism. It made feminists wonder whether this was a book of social criticism or a self-help book for the victim in all women.

There continues to be a division within the feminist ranks that is now even more clearly delineated by the publication of Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After. Some people believe that feminists dwell too much on the victimization of women and, therefore, encourage women to identify themselves as passive and helpless against the far-reaching hegemony of patriarchal ideology. Others believe that, by studying and articulating ways in which women become the victims of patriarchal hierarchies, women become empowered, because they are then more conscious of those hierarchies and self-conscious of their willingness to respect them rather than question them. Steinem would certainly be disappointed by the charge that her book encourages women to identify themselves as victims. Her aim was to write both a social critique and a self-help book, and in that sense the book is a success. It increases women’s awareness while it provides ways and means to resist oppression.

Furthermore, although the book’s title does suggest that its focus will be on the individual, Steinem makes it clear throughout that women realize their power only by interacting with other women, that a revolution from within is not feasible without a community that can support that revolution. Steinem ends the book with “A Proposal for the Future” (written one year after the book’s initial publication), in which she calls for “A national honey-comb of diverse, small, personal/political groups that are committed to each member’s welfare through both inner and outer change, self-realization and social justice.” Steinem realizes that dwelling on the needs of the individual and inner change at the expense of the needs of the community and outer change will have little effect in terms of remedying social injustice. Her call for action is sensible and inspirational and provides a necessary conclusion to a book that works to further women’s understanding that the personal and political are so inextricably intertwined, that women must address both in order to bring about worthwhile social change.

Bibliography

Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine, 1992. Estes’ project, like Steinem’s, is to empower women, but she goes about it by privileging feminine instinctive nature and the restoration of women’s vitality by means of the Wild Woman archetype.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Fox-Genovese addresses the important discrepancy between the commitment of women to their own personal successes as individuals and their commitment to collective communities of women that seek power in hierarchical institutions.

Gilligan, Carol, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer, eds. Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Gilligan and her colleagues studied pre-adolescent girls over a period of crucial years, noting the ways in which the girls came to lose confidence in their ability to know and came to denigrate their own clear-sightedness.

Roiphe, Katie. The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Roiphe’s controversial book critiques feminists’ focus on rape and sexual harassment because it reinscribes women’s need to be protected and collapses their personal, social, and psychological possibilities. She is also critical of the rigid orthodoxy that feminists around her have created.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Wolf draws an important connection between female liberation and female beauty, arguing that images of beauty are used as political weapons against women’s advancement because they, in fact, prescribe behavior, not appearance.