Fresh Air - Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Writer, activist and face of the women’s liberation movement Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at age 92. She spoke with Terry Gross several times over four decades, this remembrance pulls from three of those conversations: In 2015, Steinem talked about her unconventional childhood on the road with her parents, “My memory is that I learned how to read from ketchup bottles and labels and billboards along the highway,” she said. Steinem was a founding editor of Ms. magazine, the first feminist publication of its kind. In 1987, she spoke about the founding of the magazine and her early reporting. And in 1992, they discussed aging as she faced her golden years. You can find more Steinem tape in our archive. Also, John Powers reviews the new film Coyote vs. Acme.  which he calls a spoof of the classic legal thriller, like The Verdict or Erin Brockovich — but steeped in the surreal anarchy of Looney Tunes.Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley. 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 chauvinism, 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 Politic. 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 Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, 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, writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. She wrote nearly a dozen nonfiction 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, you know, food, make-up babies and celebrities, but that was pretty much it. And though I brailed against it, 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, And 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 magazine.

So we started to meet and discuss whether or not, you know, a magazine might be possible. Did you find, too, that a lot of male editors thought that it was just too specialized, too narrow, to write about issues like abortion or equality for women? Yeah, because all of their readers wouldn't be interested in it. No, absolutely. And that was true on the left and on the right. You know, you would find, I'm sorry to say, because I have much more affection for the but you 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, it 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, the cover story of pronouncing the women's movement over was from 1969 before the magazine ever started. Well, that was pretty premature.

Right. What did you think the state of feminist coverage was in the mainstream media in the early? early 70s and late 60s. It was mostly ridicule, really, because that was the era of, quote, bra burners, unquote, an alliterative epithet invented by a 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, I don't know, a steno pad, 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, but they never did because they couldn't get a fire permit. I mean, this is, you know, we were just much too docile, right? But nonetheless, he picked up, he couldn't resist the alliteration. And that was symbolic of the kind 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 the power structure. We did, but it wasn't totally, it was somewhat wrong, but not totally wrong. For instance, when we started out, I mean, an example of our naivete was that we sat around, there were eight of us,

and we sat around and we fixed each other. 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 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, were older and had been earning, you know, higher salaries in the past. So we did fix each other's salaries, but we took three things in mind. One, what our need was, two, 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, 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 a little microcosm of 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 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, $200,000 or more, and the secretary earns $10. You know, I mean, at least we narrowed the gap a lot. Did you go through this phenomenon that when you 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, complain bitterly about men? Yeah, you're right. You're right. 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 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, you know, midnight castration parties or something. I don't know. And I think that's true. You know, it's so threatening, oddly threatening, for a few women 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 guess, I mean, this may sound strange, but I'm just beginning to realize that I need to do some of the things that I have been saying should be done. In other words, I've been telling women for, instance, or trying to help women editorially know how to manage their 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 was just having a 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 money. I hadn't internalized the message myself.

Your grandmother was a suffragist and a delegate to a big international convention back in 1908. I wonder if that had any effect on you at all, because I should point out, she's on your father's side, and I believe he left your mother when you were pretty young. So was there any feminist legacy passed on from her through the family? 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 than 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 many suffrages 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 with the anarchists and the socialists. They sort of conveniently forgot that part.

Were they embarrassed by it? I don't know. It wasn't conscious on their parts exactly. But it was, it was, I think it just wasn't social. 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 in Toledo wrote a monograph about my grandmother and sent it to me that I had any idea of the scope of her activities. You said that this worried you in a way because it meant that other families or other women can forget what happened before. Is that what you're 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 so into this. And it is not post-feminist, no matter what the New York Times 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, 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. And 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 law in New York State. This was before the Supreme Court ruling. And a group of early feminists, a just say, 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. Let's hear from women who have actually had this experience.

So I sat there as a reporter for New York Magazine listening to women tell their stories, you know, 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 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 has changed. 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 child at that age? You know, it just, you know, I don't know what would have happened. I had been doing all the foolish things that we then did, like riding horseback, throwing ourselves downstairs, you know, all kinds of things in the hope.

Let me stop you right there. Did you throw yourself downstairs? Yeah, kind of. I did. 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 atypical childhood. your mother was often incapacitated by depression. Can we call it depression? You know, I don't know what to call it. 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. 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 it 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 in a bus. And so we would be kind of canned music and a jukebox. And so we would. get some famous band sometimes, Wayne King and Jovenuti. I mean, names, I don't know if people

know anymore. And 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 that broke your mother's spirit? It just wasn't hers. Well, let me describe what she had been doing 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 lots of difficulties.

She had my sister, who was nine years older than me. And I think, you know, as she later explained, she'd fallen 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 Power, reviews Coyote v. Acme, the comedy film based on the classic Warner Brothers cartoon character. I'm David B. and Cooley, and this is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. and Cooley. 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. It was often hard for her to get out of bed. Your father created this, you know, like wonderful dance pavilion summers. 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're right that you never start. 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 itinerant like that? I suppose the two things happen at once when you're a 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 or 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 envy 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, to be frank. 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 truant officer showed up, she would use her teaching certificate. The fact that it was for university calculus, which she had been teaching in order to make money to finish college herself. I don't know how impressive it would have been. But anyway, 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 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 there 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 if 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 did it make you think of her differently than you did before? No, I don't, didn't make me think of her differently. 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. Are you 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. I mean, 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. So 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 seemed strange to the other kids. Gloria Steinem speaking to Terry Gross in 2015. More after a break. This is fresh air. 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 who had been inside the civil rights movement and the 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 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 life. very ambivalent relationship to home. You write that it took you a really long time to create a comfortable home for yourself, in part because you were on the road all the time, and you grew up on the road until you were 10. At what point in your life did you create a home that was truly a comfortable place, 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 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 buy 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 a 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 needs a nest, and they still fly. So it took me a while that it wasn't either or it was both. I interviewed you 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. Oh, that's shocking. Right? And one of the things you talked about was you were looking back on having had a lumpectomy, breast cancer, and how that affected.

you. So I want to play what you said about that. So again, this is from 1992, Gloria Steinem, looking back on having that lumpectomy and how it affected her life. It made me realize several things. One was, this may sound strange if I try to say it short, but that actually I was less afraid of dying than of aging, or not of aging exactly. I didn't know how. 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, you know, 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 meant a lot 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 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 our true selves. You know what I find particularly interesting about hearing you thinking 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, you know, 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 old age 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 us. Yes, it's sort of the secular version of hell, I think. And like the religious version of hell, it has nothing to do with real life.

Okay, that was Gloria Steinem on Fresh Air in 1992, and I just did the math, and I think you were 58 when that was recorded. So, no. Thank you. Thank you for playing that, because it's fascinating to listen to your earlier self. Yeah, so just what you said then still ring true? Yes, it does, and I realize that I realize 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 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.

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 nine 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 on. That was before gender descended for most of us, as Carol Gilligan has pointed out in her work. after 50, you've 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 you can do what you want. there is, as I was saying then, 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 are now out of the house, so now, like, you have more independence.

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, nor should we escape it necessarily. What does being in your 80s symbolize to you now? You told us a little bit what 50 and 60 symbolized. Shock and what sense? I stop people on the street and tell them how old I 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. Part of it is, I think, because we don't have role models of people going ahead of us. I don't have 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 in 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 Ms. 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, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled to be published later this month. Coming up, Critic-at-Large John Powers, reviews Coyote v. Acme, the newly released film in which Will Forte shares the screen with some classic cartoon co-stars. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. The famous cartoon series featuring the Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote was created in 1949.

It has remained so popular it's even spawned the new movie, Coyote versus Acme, 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. Its true hero is not, of course, that smug, bee-beeping bird. It's his perpetually thwarted pursuer, Wiley Coyote, who alone in the most stripped-down of deserts

endures the endless futility of a Beckett character. In fact, the character was created the same. time as waiting for Godot. Scheming it inept, while he's so hell-bent on catching the roadrunner, that he keeps buying shoddy contraptions, rocket skates, self-guiding bombs, earthquake pills, from a corporation called Acme. Their misfires inevitably blow him up, clobber him with anvils, or send him plummeting off a cliff.

The unreliability of these products inspired a witty 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier. Coyote v. Acme, in which Wiley Coyote sues Acme for damages. In turn, that piece inspired the terrifically entertaining new movie, Coyote v. 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 tax write-off. Blending live action with animation, Coyote v. Acme takes Frazier's piece

and transforms it into a spoofing riff on the classic legal thriller. Think the verdict are Aaron Brockovich. But one steeped 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 hang-dog soul, who fears failure so much that he only takes on small cases and settles them for a pittance.

Luckily, Avery's intern, Paige, that's Lanna Condor, is an idealist. She pushes him into filing a massive suit against Acme, the world's most powerful company. Acme's 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 other Warner Brothers tunes,

daffy duck, tweedy bird, pantsless porky pig, and of course the incomparable bugs. Along the way, Team Coyote unearths a sinister Acme project named after Ciciface, 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 beside him. Now, what did the defense say we're going to argue? Huh?

I mean, I know the answer to it. I know the answer. I'm not asking you a question. I mean, 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 acne is negligent in 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 Brothers cartoons was their imaginative delight in shattering the laws of nature,

often violently. Wiley Coyote can get smushed by a steamroller, pick himself up, dust himself off, and inflate himself back, to normal size. Coyote v. Acme serves up a slew of delirious gags 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 form. 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 chasee, whose lives depend for their meaning on the presence of the other. And needless to say, Coyote v. 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 outsource jobs to cheaper countries, manufacture 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 suggests that the courts and Congress kowtow 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 v. 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 Roseanne 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 Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support

from Julian Hertzfeld and Adam Stanishevsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinato, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wist. Our digital media producer is Molly C.D. Nesper. Our social media video producer is Hillary Kissinger.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean, Pooley.