Seductress (36 page)

Her ultimatum was a star legal turn. With Lilith’s “smooth” eloquence, she argued that women, who were legally “persons,” already had the vote by constitutional law. This was followed by a bigger bomb in 1872, when she formed the Equal Rights party and announced her candidacy for president. Before sold-out crowds across the country she demanded reforms that anticipated legislation by a generation: social security, national education, graduated income tax, antimonopoly laws, a global foreign policy, a league of nations, and, of course, universal suffrage. It was a Lilith platform—total social upheaval.

Her sex plank killed her. Feminists and small-town America gasped with horror as she perorated from the pulpit: “The very first necessity is freedom for women sexually.” Defiling every sanctity of male privilege and feminine purity, she called for a single standard, orgasm parity, cultivation of erotic artistry, and women’s “supreme authority in the domain of sex.” If that led women outside the marital preserve, so be it. “Yes, I am a free lover!” she thundered, and lived up to her word. On a typical evening she told an escort at a rally that she “should dearly like to sleep with him” and ushered him home. Such pranks did not sit well with puritanical America. Supporters deserted and the campaign fizzled. Victoria was booed, blacklisted, and denied housing. When she retaliated by outing the hypocritical womanizer, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (whom she bedded along with his cohort Theodore Tildon), she ended up in Ludlow Jail. There she received news of the 1872 election—the farewell to her presidential bid.

The scandal ruined her American prospects. Eventually she and her huge, dissolute family sailed for England to recoup their fortunes. Victoria divorced Blood (who roared that “the grandest woman in the world” had forsaken him) and recast herself for the British market. Wearing a sober black gown with a single red rose, she lectured on sex education.

She caught the eye of a wealthy banker, John Martin, who found her “more alive than anyone” and saw “miracles” in her presence. She cured him of an unspecified sexual problem and married him in 1883. From then until her death in 1927, she presided over their country estate like a
Masterpiece Theater
mistress of the manor.

On the surface, this seemed a retreat to Adam’s Eden. But far from dominating her, Martin treated her with kid gloves and encouraged her radical activism. She published a leftist journal and advocated drastic social reforms, though in a diluted form. In 1892 she made a second bid for the U.S. presidency and shrugged off the loss with customary panache. “The truth is,” she said, “I am too many years ahead of this age.”

Perhaps for the first time, she understated. Victoria Woodhull adumbrated the twenty-first-century liberal agenda and envisioned the total empowerment of postmodern women. Just before she died, she stopped a gardener cleaning the walk. “Those weeds have the courage to grow in the path of man,” she commanded. “Don’t murder them.”

She understood that to deflect the tide of injustice required more than due process and business as usual. Sometimes you had to be a rascal, a firebrand, a shapeshifter, and a
saboteuse.
“Woman,” she said, is a “grand seductive force, a magazine of enticement and influence and power.” She was her own proof positive: a “beautiful seductress” who rocked nineteenth-century America with a culturequake that still reverberates today.

Over Gloria Steinem’s desk hangs a picture of Victoria Woodhull. The similarities between these two feminist icons are enough to suggest a Woodhullian reincarnation trick. Both beautiful, smooth-tongued, and media wise, they shared the same louche backgrounds, disorderly childhoods, itinerant lifestyles, and four-star love lives.

They went head to head with the status quo, sowed discord, and led revolutions for social and domestic justice. But the amperage dropped in the channeling process. While Victoria identified with the goddess Nike, the Titan slayer, Gloria saw herself as Artemis, who “bonded with other women.”

By solidifying female support, Gloria achieved greater practical gains than Victoria and transformed the social landscape of twentieth-century America. But she paid a price. To call off the dogs of feminine competition, she had to disguise the seductress, downplay her sex appeal, and discount the seductive arts in her program for women’s liberation. She couldn’t wave “GO FOR THE O’S” placards at Kenosha housewives; she couldn’t flaunt her conquests and expect women’s solidarity. As a result, she couldn’t rise to Victoria’s sweeping futuristic agenda. But she made a radical difference in our era and privately, at least, got it on—in Lilith style.

Just as Victoria Woodhull’s upbringing fostered her development as a
Machtweib
revolutionary, so Gloria’s equally unorthodox youth prepared her for the barricades and seduction. Her family was not your average Norman Rockwell household. One grandmother had been a hell-raising suffragist, and her mother worked as a journalist on the
Toledo Blade
when many women stayed at home.

After Gloria’s birth in 1934 her mother quit her job and joined her father, Leo, in a peripatetic existence that involved summer months running a dance pavilion at a lake resort and the rest of the year, touring the country in an Airstream trailer. They lived on the move with creditors at their heels.

Of the two daughters, Gloria was her father’s pet, fostering a lifelong devotion “to men as a sex.” A jolly free spirit and hustler, Leo stamped his stationary “Originator” and bragged that he’d never worked for anyone. Thanks to this unconventional “carnival existence,” Gloria spent her formative years without feminine indoctrination or formal schooling.

She was eleven when she entered school, but instead of education as usual, she led a bizarre double life. Her parents divorced in 1946, and for six years she shuttled between the classroom and a rat-infested Toledo shanty, where she nursed her mentally ill mother. Although forced to grow up too soon in grueling hardship, she escaped a worse fate: post-World War II socialization that decreed female niceness, chastity, conformity, and domestic servitude. Her mother, too deranged to mold her, simply told Gloria she’d been born under a “special star” and let her invent herself.

With a windfall profit from the sale of the back lot, Gloria was able to attend Smith College, then an incubator for smart wives of Ivy League scions. There too she broke the fifties mold. She wore jeans and net stockings instead of Peter Pan collars and pearls, and she savored premarital sex.

Hell-bent on “not [being] a victim,” she positioned herself as a man chooser and
charmeuse.
In her senior year she became engaged to a “Mogul prince” of a man, a cultivated army flier who loved her brains and spikiness and supported her ambitions. But Gloria, un-conditioned to the marital ideal, heard the key in the lock and broke the engagement.

Instead she spent two years in India on a grant. She organized women, helped the poor, and became a convert to Gandhian political thought. The Eisenhower America she returned to, however, did not roll out the welcome mat for reformists. So she freelanced in journalism for the next ten years, sharpening her verbal skills and waiting for the wind to change.

She also acquired a corps of power mentors, men who loved, aided, and rooted for her. Model pretty with showgirl legs and the stride of a dancer (the result of years of tap lessons in Toledo), she was, as one beau put it, a “knockout with a big brain.” A-list New York City bachelors numbered among her lovers: Robert Benton, creator of
Bonnie and Clyde;
Tom Guinzberg, Viking Press heir; Herb Sargent, producer of
That Was the Week That Was;
Peter Falk; Mike Nichols; and others.

All had their choice of the most beautiful, accomplished women. But Gloria’s charm cocktail was a potent brew. Benton said she gave him “a sense of himself ” and inspired him to write through her ego nurture; Sargent praised her IQ and “natural” teaching abilities; the rest spoke of her relaxed indifference to “ordinary anxieties,” her “funny,” “bright” conversation.

By her own admission, she was strongly sexed, an “aerobics” expert in bed. Many tried to marry her, but with the goddess’s polyamorism, she preferred serial minimarriages. One New Yorker says he could write a book about the number of “famous men who have wept on [his] shoulder” over her. She made men walk the tortuous path. Along with Ms. Goodfeel, she was the divine Lady Difficult—self-willed, opinionated, insubordinate, Mona Lisa mysterious, autonomous, and averse to commitment.

In 1968 her moment arrived. She entered activist politics and soon took the lead in the left-wing groundswell sweeping the country. She wrote exposés, stumped for McGovern, supported the grape pickers, and in a “blinding lightbulb” moment, discovered feminism and ran away with it.

Training her siren power on the body politic, she seduced to convert. Her calculated glamour and sex appeal demolished every manhater-in-Birkenstocks stereotype and consolidated support from moderates and men. Decked out in black miniskirts and tinted aviator glasses hooked under long, streaked hair, she preached revolution in a phone sex contralto. The barbed sound bites were tossed off like flirtatious quips: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”; “If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.”

As the ranks filled, she founded the Women’s Action Alliance, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and
MS.
(the first national magazine run by women), applying the seductive emollients of TLC and flattery to oil wheels and unify feminism.

Her love life meanwhile never missed a beat. Throughout the round-the-clock barnstorming, she surrounded herself with “lovable men who adored and were kind to her,” especially African Americans such as Frank Thomas, former head of the Ford Foundation. No amount of self-denigration could conceal the evidence: She was too sexy, too successful with men. At last the sisterhood cried foul and assailed her with a barrage of sellout accusations.

Gloria’s response was not Victoria Woodhull’s. Instead of blowing them off, Gloria adopted a policy of appeasement. She pooh-poohed her charms and discredited seduction as a politically incorrect “primordial skill,” an “alarmingly easy business.” Anxious to placate angry rivals, she cut erotic empowerment (and a proactive plan to achieve it) out of the feminist agenda.

As one critic observed, she didn’t “tell the truth.” While continuing to burn up the track as a seductress, she sold American women on victim sexual politics and flower child openness and honesty. Unwittingly she eviscerated the movement. Bereft of its swerve and sex appeal, feminism withered on the vine.
MS.
became dull copy.

In 1989 the magazine foundered and became an adless, special-interest publication supported first by readers and later by a foundation. During these backlash years Gloria might have honorably retired to academe as a titled feminist figurehead. But she refused to pipe down on social issues and, with the goddess’s protean plasticity, adopted a new persona.

After a bout with breast cancer in her fifties, she entered a period of intense self-analysis that radically altered and enlarged her perspective and resulted in three best-selling psychological how-tos. With deepened insight, she now argued that true liberation begins from a baseline of self-esteem and requires the active pursuit of psychic totality and growth.

By that criterion, she’s a paragon of free womanhood. Since the early nineties she’s been the principle of dynamic evolution in action. She moved from predictable lovers like Stan Pottinger, U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, to the wildly inappropriate business mogul Morton Zuckerman. Then, at sixty-six, she flip-flopped, reversed her ancient prejudice against matrimony, and married David Bale.

According to Hebraic legend, Lilith’s rebellious raids will cease with the coming of the Messiah. And Bale (who died in 2003) was a New Age Messiah if there ever was one. Handsome and consciousness-raised, he was a successful entrepreneur who held gender roles in contempt, espoused human and animal rights, and fell in love with Gloria’s ideas before he met her.

Yet he didn’t stop his wife’s jihad on the established order. She’s still in battle mode, mouthing off about equality and female entitlement and teaching “Revolution 101” to anyone who’ll listen. Without the false front to maintain—the “what-me-sexy?” camouflage—Gloria has grown more radical and daring with time.

She may wind up the “pioneer dirty old lady” she once imagined, leading the lost postfeminist grandchildren to the frontier, the promised land of full empowerment in love, work, and political office. Anyway, she’s praying. “Dear Goddess,” she writes at the end of “Doing Sixty”:

Somewhere, in the brainwashed depths of the female psyche, we think we should be the precinct workers and backstage girls of male politicians. If we step out on our own and take the gavel, men won’t love us anymore. As Jacqueline Kennedy put it, “There are two kinds of women; those who want power in the world and those who want power in bed.”

This is the sort of bipolar fallacy that makes female leaders check their sex appeal at the statehouse door and yield the field to senate groupies and concupiscent chick interns. But that isn’t the divine plan.
Machtweiber
are. They expose the false dichotomies—scare tactics to keep women from politics—and resurrect an archetype that predates the god-king, the prehistoric Mistress of the Universe, the first sex goddess.

These siren-politicas of course aren’t typical. Most women who ruled in Western history were snookered by the phony dualities and lost out sexually or politically. But winners inspire and predict the future. They also instruct—often in unexpected ways.

Machtweiber
throw out the child development bibles. Instead of the secure, supportive environments deemed essential for leaders, each, except Eleanor of Aquitaine, had a horrendous childhood, filled with neglect, cruelty, and violence.