Gloria Steinem was due to speak at a women’s lunch in New York at the end of this month and at more events in October, illustrating the central theme of An Unexpected Life, her new memoir, which, when it’s published a few weeks from now, will stand as posthumous testament to the 92-year-old icon: just keep going. So it is, after her death on Wednesday, that the book’s opening pages unfold with a deep, added poignancy and when Steinem expresses gratitude for a life that has been both happier and longer “than I ever imagined”, one is struck by the greater gratitude we probably owe her.
An Unexpected Life is a follow-up of sorts to My Life on the Road, the activist’s memoir of a decade ago, and as the tributes pour in, the book offers us an opportunity to go back over Steinem’s hardscrabble origins in Toledo, Ohio, and the roots of her activism. This is where it all happened, the formation of a woman who would come to define second wave feminism by combining a tough-as-they-come stance with something that looked a lot like serenity. Reading the first half of the book, one is reminded of Steinem’s original power and the improbability and iconoclasm of her journey, in which a childhood governed by poverty and dysfunction turned into a lifelong mission to resist the narrow templates laid out for her.
