Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
Premise - A collection of feminist essays written by Gloria Steinem. While many of the essays are more generally political, others stem from her real-life experiences as a feminist lecturer and activist. Steinem's essays highlight the progress society has made towards gender equality, while also stressing how much further there is to go, and how incrementally slow this change can be.
Review - This book is everything I wished My Life on the Road was. I truly wish I had read this first. This is not to say that I disliked My Life on the Road, which was Gloria Steinem's memoir, but that book required contextual knowledge about Steinem's life and work to fully appreciate it. Much of it might have been lost on me because I did not understand who Gloria Steinem truly was, and the memoir was not written in chronological order.
As a collection of essays, this book felt far more fundamental and generalizable, and makes for great basic feminist reading. Of course, the events of her life are still not told in chronological order, but that is irrelevant as each essay stands on its own. The essays take a variety of formats, sometimes as personal stories, or homages to others, or sometimes powerful satirical pieces such as "If Men Could Menstruate."
By far my favorite essay was towards the beginning of the book, "I Was a Playboy Bunny." This essay was also the longest and takes up a large chunk of the book. This was a personal, TRUE story of Gloria Steinem's, and I felt as though it could have been an entire novel on its own. It's about the time when Gloria Steinem went undercover as a playboy bunny for a few weeks, creating a fake identity and all, in order to investigate the lives of the women who live as actual Playboy bunnies. I was getting serious Miss Congeniality vibes, and kept thinking that this essay should be adapted into a film. Turns out I'm a little too late, as apparently it was already made into TV film back in the 80's! I just couldn't believe that Gloria Steinem actually DID that, actually putting herself in that situation for real and living it. It never hit me so hard as it did in that essay that Steinem does not just write about feminist issues from behind some typewriter - she actively goes out into the world to make real change. She puts herself at risk for the sake of a real, tangible movement.
Towards the end of the book, when the essays become more generally political, it gets a bit boring - at least in comparison to the wild adventures of that Playboy bunny life. But overall, the short essay format makes this a very readable text. Gloria Steinem is a glorious writer.
I'm including this under the category of "Our Shared Shelf" even though it was not an official OSS pick. The very first OSS pick was Steinem's My Life on the Road, and as a feminist icon, Steinem has such an important impact on OSS. Also, in this newest edition that I bought, Emma Watson wrote the foreword (which is also why I'm including this under the Emma Watson category even though it wasn't something she acted in, but it is technically her work). The whole reason I bought this book was to read Emma Watson's foreword of which she posted a small piece on Instagram. I was disappointed in how poorly edited/proofread the foreword was. I'm not one to talk, as these blog entries are so colloquially and messily written but this was a PUBLISHED WORK. I suppose I was also disappointed because her writing is very strong on some of her OSS blog posts, so I know she can write. I figured that in a publication her writing would be even stronger because there would be more eyes on it before it went out into the world. But seriously it could have gone through a few more rounds of editing to help with word flow and grammatical syntax, and make it seem more professional. Her ideas are good, and an important addition to this text. (89/100).
Quote - “Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Once, women were trained to marry a doctor, not be one.”
What to read for - I WAS A PLAYBOY BUNNY. I also really liked "In Praise of Women's Bodies" and "If Men Could Menstruate."
If you liked this book, I'd recommend Miss Congeniality!
Written by Gloria Steinem
Published by Picador
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