With its recent premiere on Amazon Prime, Julie Taymor’s The Glorias illustrates the life and various journeys of the trailblazing feminist activist and journalist, Gloria Steinem. Depicted through four different actresses, we follow the feminist heroine throughout the numerous phases of her life, highlighting her continuous commitment to women’s rights.
With Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Lulu Wilson, Alicia Vikander, and Julianne Moore playing the icon from adolescence to adulthood, the intermingling of her selves makes up the biopic based on Steinem’s autobiographical book, My Life on the Road. Told by way of Julie Taymor and Sarah Ruhl, The Glorias portrays everything from her unstable childhood to her abundant travels and ultimately coming into her own as an activist.
We all get by with a little help from our friends, and Taymor’s biopic incorporates the crusading, outspoken group of fierce feminists who fought alongside Steinem throughout the Women’s Liberation Movement. With Bette Midler as a convincing Bella Abzug, Janelle Monáe as the inimitable Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Lorraine Toussaint as the wildly vivacious Flo Kennedy, Kimberly Norris-Guerrero as Wilma Mankiller, and Allie McCulloch as the pioneering attorney Brenda Feigen, the film captures the important strident and resilient figures fighting for the cause.
Steinem took to Instagram to explain, “When Julie Taymor called to say she would like to option my book, My Life on the Road, I just said yes, you can do anything you want. I think she is the great filmmaker of our time, the rare person about whom I hear myself saying the word genius. Have you seen Across the Universe or Frida? I rest my case. However, I didn’t have a clue how she could make a movie out of a book that covers at least eight decades and two continents. It is as intimate as my story of having an abortion, and as public as two Marches on Washington a half century apart. I didn’t know — but I just had faith. She has done this by emotional connections and genius visuals. My favorite is a Greyhound Bus through time. Different people — and different ages of the same person, me included — sit next to each other and talk to each other. They also see different places, faces and highways out of the window. I have faith in this movie because sharing our stories is the most ancient and true way of learning — we haven’t been sitting around campfires for millennia for nothing — and I hope this will entice you into sharing yours in this Talking Circle. Even the Internet is a giant campfire. At its best, it is teaching us that we are all passengers on Space Ship Earth. COVID19 is making us feel an intimacy out of shared suffering, and we are learning that Earth is our shared Mother — as Alice Walker says, ‘Her blue body, everything we know.’”
Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, the beginning of Steinem’s life coincided with the peak of the Great Depression. Coming from an unstable, peripatetic childhood with a mentally ill mother and a nomadic father, their various travels incited a curiosity in the young Gloria. After her parents divorced and her sister went off to college, Steinem was left to care for her mother.
After graduating from Smith College, Steinem moved to New York to follow her journalistic dreams. Following her significant piece for Esquire on the state of the “contraceptive revolution” in 1962, came her legendary essay “A Bunny’s Tale,” for Show magazine. The assignment had Steinem go undercover at Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club at the height of its popularity and describe her firsthand experiences, exposing a toxic workplace environment of exploitation and sexual harassment.
In 1970, she testified in the Senate in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, and one year later, the National Women’s Political Caucus. Together with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, a publication meant to highlight the inequalities of women through an intersectional feminist lens, and the first of its kind to have been founded, owned and run strictly by women.
From fighting for women’s right to choose in a pre-Roe v. Wade world to arguing against sexual harassment to spotlighting sexist job listings, Gloria Steinem became the unofficial poster girl of second-wave feminism. By standing up for lesbian rights and speaking out against racism and classism, Gloria Steinem showed us that being a feminist meant fighting for the equality for all women — of any race, ethinicity, nationality, class, or sexual orientation. At 86 years old, the radical changemaker shows no signs of slowing down. Watching The Glorias will give you a deeper look into Steinem’s vision and accomplishments as she continues to fight for equality.
At the tail-end of the film, Steinheim is seen declaring at the 2017 Women’s March: “We are here, and around the world for a deep democracy, that says we will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected. God may be in the details, but the goddess is in connections. We are linked. We are not ranked. We are the people. We have people power and we will use it. This is the upside of the downside. This is an outpouring of energy and true democracy like I have never seen in my very long life. It is wide in age, it is deep in diversity, and remember — the constitution does not begin with ‘I the president,’ it begins with ‘We the people.’”
