SINCE GLORIA STEINEM passed away on 2 September, the US feminist’s global legacy has been lauded and extolled, as well as critiqued seemingly threadbare. Her links to the CIA, which she never denied; her support for the Zionist cause; her fraught relationship with Black feminism; her stint in India during the Cold War; the schisms at Ms., the legendary magazine that she co-founded: all have come under scrutiny. Yet her deep and damaging impact on the movement for sex workers’ rights has been less analysed – and this, arguably, is one her most lasting legacies in Southasia.
Steinem represented a bold and fearless feminism that was as personal as it was political, influencing women around the world. Southasian feminists, too, read Ms. in the 1970s, and Steinem’s sharp, insightful satire hit right on target in this region as elsewhere. Her 1978 essay ‘If men could menstruate’ became an anthem of sorts for feminists in Southasia, where menstruation was – and often still is – a taboo topic. It proposed that, if men rather than women had period pain, the government would urgently form a “National Institute of Dysmenhorrea” to ameliorate the problem – something that, satire aside, would have been as welcome for women in the 1970s as today, when painful periods remain an underresearched and underfunded health concern. Steinem was a pioneer also in her involvement in a range of issues – from domestic violence, reproductive freedom and equal pay to public health, militarisation and world peace – with an approach that would today be termed intersectional.
Like much of feminist thought, Steinem’s work focussed heavily on power and its disparities, and the ways these disparities shape and warp the lives of women, men and others across societies. Her view on sex work, too, was built around a particular understanding of gendered power. Steinem posited that prostitution – she refused to call it “sex work” – manifests an inherent power disparity between male buyers and female sellers of sex. In this construct, women are passive, mute and helpless pawns in the transaction, which is understood to be inevitably an act of gendered violence. Speaking on a visit to India in 2014, aged 79, Steinem was characteristically direct. Prostitution, she told reporters, is a form of “commercial rape”. It “involves body invasion and so it is not like any other work. So how can you call it sex work? Prostitution is the only word you should use.”