May 13, 2007
Gloria Steinem’s Friends Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz have been discussing feminism, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky. Again, without any desire to interrupt, I think a minor bit of outside evidence might be useful. Messrs. Zeitz and Gordon are debating, in part, whether “Gloria Steinem et al.” treated Bill Clinton better than he deserved because he was a Democrat, and whether a “moderate Republican (like Bob Packwood)” would have been allowed to get away with such behavior. To add my two cents, I think Clinton’s behavior should have elicited a much more censorious response from leading feminists. My aim in posting, however, is not to hold forth about that man’s personal improprieties. Instead, I’d like to offer a little evidence that Gloria Steinem is somewhat more politically unpredictable than Mr. Gordon suggests. The Clinton scandal was not the only affair of the 1990s in which Steinem was offered the chance to comment on the sexual ethics of a Democratic politician. At the beginning of the decade, long before anyone ever knew the name of Monica Lewinsky, Democratic Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, the son-in-law of Lyndon Johnson, was caught in a liaison with a much younger woman—a onetime Miss Virginia, as a matter of fact. This was surprising at the time, since Robb had long been viewed as an upstanding veteran and a “conservative, stodgy, almost boring family man.” In response to the revelations about his personal life, Robb, like Clinton, split hairs over the details of his affair. In the face of evidence that he had engaged in some sex acts with the former beauty queen, Tai Collins, Robb denied having committed adultery because he had never had sexual intercourse with a woman other than his wife. Despite Robb’s status as a Democrat in good standing, Gloria Steinem thought his explanations were too clever by half. “People do care very deeply about our leaders telling the truth,” she told the Washington Post in an interview during Robb’s 1994 reelection campaign. “By Robb’s logic in this case, it’s kind of like saying if he’d had oral sex with another man, he wouldn’t be homosexual.” While Steinem did not accuse Robb of committing sexual harassment or taking advantage of a younger woman (Collins was 30 at the time their affair began), she did make it obvious that she considered the senator a dissembler and a hypocrite. A secondary note is that Steinem may be, as Mr. Gordon and Mr. Zeitz agree, a staunch Democrat, but she has not always hewed so close to the party line. In 1980, an op-ed columnist criticized Steinem’s decision to raise funds through a NARAL mailing list for “a candidate for the U.S. Senate who had voted for the neutron bomb, for recision of their ERA votes by states that had already ratified, for arms sales to Chile, against public financing of Congressional campaigns and against hospital cost containment.” With a phrase that now seems ironic, the columnist continued: “Of course, the candidate is Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon.” Before the scandal that unraveled his Senate career, Packwood was known for his pro-choice views and his easy relationships with liberals like Steinem. Together, Packwood and Steinem fought Henry Hyde’s eponymous anti-abortion legislation. It was in an act of principle that Steinem pivoted to oppose Packwood. And it may have been a result of the enduring antagonism between her and Congressman Hyde, who returned to prominence as Bill Clinton’s tormentor, that prevented her from turning similarly on the forty-second President.
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