Opinion | In honor of Women’s History Month, look to Gloria Steinem
In a 2022 New York Times magazine interview, Gloria Steinem reminds women that if men could menstruate, reproductive health would not be stigmatized and regulated, but a “sacrament.” WikiCommons
Gloria Steinem should rewrite a U.S. Constitution solely geared toward women.
While, yes, that sounds like a very, very large step in the Women’s Liberation Movement — to write an entirely new constitution for women — how could it possibly be overstepping? After all, the U.S constitution was only written by men and only oriented toward men.
Hannah Smith, assistant news & politics editor
Interestingly enough, despite Abigail Adams’s famous advice to her husband John Adams to “remember the ladies,” he and the rest of the founders left any mention of women out of the founding documents.
As a result, the word “woman” isn’t even mentioned a single time in the U.S. Constitution to this day. Not once.
In keeping with the lack of female representation in the constitution, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled abortion unconstitutional. The majority opinion for the Dobbs decision from Justice Samuel Alito stated that abortion is not a legitimate unenumerated right as it is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.”
Simply put: women’s fundamental reproductive rights are not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.”According to the founders, women have not ever been “fundamental” or “traditional” to the constitution.
Women had to work for nearly 50 years in the liberation movement to de-stigmatize and legalize female reproductive rights — with Roe v. Wade setting abortion as a right in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment — only for their efforts to be dampened by Dobbs. Efforts like feminist activist and journalist Steinem’s.
Over the course of 50 years, Steinem has helped usher the idea of feminism from a radical idea into the mainstream media, normalizing conversations about abortion access that were once confined to secretive discussions in church basements.
In 1971, Steinem not only co-founded Ms. Magazine, the first female-led magazine, (spelled “Mizz,” not “Mrs.” to separate their feminist efforts from a man’s tie to a woman’s title), but she also co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus — with the mission of increasing the number of women in politics.
“Obviously, without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy,” Steinem said in a 2022 New York Times interview. “Authoritarian movements tend to start by restricting women because we have wombs. Hitler, after he was elected, declared abortion a crime against the state.”
In a Time Magazine interview, Steinem emphasized that the single biggest determinant of whether a country is violent or will use military violence against another country is not poverty, natural resources, religion or even degree of democracy. It is their violence against women.
Gloria Steinem gave a speech at a women's conference in 1975. WikiCommons
Steinem’s New York Magazine articles, Ms. Magazine articles and political activism are all relevant today in a somewhat patriarchal time where women have lost reproductive freedom.
Some of the articles, even with their satirical mannerisms, could easily be taken more seriously by women than many male political figures, and the male-oriented constitution.
In her article "If Men Could Menstruate," Steinem scrutinizes the sexist social constructions of dominant western attitudes towards menstruation by imagining a world in which men, not women, menstruate.
“So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?” Steinem wrote. “Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much. Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.”
In regards to how reproductive health care would alter, Steinem wrote: “To prevent monthly work loss among the powerful, Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea (pain associated with menstrual cycles). Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men were hormonally protected, but everything about cramps.”
According to Steinem, if reproductive health became a male-oriented matter, not only would the fate of reproductive healthcare be flip-flopped — but destigmatized and turned into a celebratory competition.
In a recent Time Magazine interview, Steinem emphasized this point.
“Florynce Kennedy used to say, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” Steinem said.