Mothers often approach Gloria Steinem lamenting that their daughters don’t know who she is.
“That’s OK,” Steinem tells them. “As long as they know who they are.”
The world’s most famous feminist has hit the road, spending the days before the election meeting with Colorado women — some who have long revered her and others who barely knew her name.
“Gloria Steinem? Never heard of the lady before a neighbor invited me,” said Lauren Landes, 16, who made the trip from Loveland to Westminster for a gathering Sunday.
Steinem is a Clinton-cum-Obama supporter, but she isn’t here with any campaign.
Rather, she came with a van full of friends road-tripping up and down the Front Range to advocate for Democrats, diss the so-called “personhood amendment” and wax philosophic about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
Why? To swing the state — and possibly the nation — women’s way.
“What makes it possible for us to be activists is that we’re not alone and that we don’t feel crazy,” she told a crowd brunching at a Cherry Hills Village house party.
At 74, the activist and Ms. Magazine founder still writes, lectures and makes trouble on behalf of her gender when she is not messing with her new iPhone.
To three groups of women she met with Sunday, she urged a no vote on Amendment 48 — a measure that threatens abortion rights by defining a fertilized egg as a person. She warned that a John McCain presidency might nationalize their wombs.
She rallied for fixing a system that pays women 77 cents on the dollar.
And, wearing a button reading, “Hillary supports Obama. So do I,” she took shots at Palin, whom she describes as “a mean girl grown up.”
“McCain has been a profound sexist in lowering standards to appeal to the evangelical right,” she said. “My fantasy is that in 10 years, (Palin) will wake up and realize she was used as a pawn.”
Colorado isn’t the first place into which Steinem has parachuted politically. In a rented recreational vehicle, she toured the Midwest before the 2004 election. In a bus, she rallied Washington and Oregon in 2000.
“But for the first time in my life, there are people who are not just willing to vote, but fighting to vote,” she said of this year’s election.
In many ways, Steinem is preaching to the choir, knowing full well that most in her audiences already lean her way. Still, she aims to sway the undecided, even if there are only a few of them.
No mommies’ group or book club is too small for a visit from the band of buddies who flew in from both coasts to join Steinem’s odyssey through Colorado.
Her entourage nearly outnumbered women who gathered in an Edgewater living room Sunday to talk politics over spinach pie.
Before the event, I found myself in the restroom, where I noticed some sunglasses next to the sink. They were the big, round aviator types that have been Steinem’s trademark since the ’70s.
For some reason, I picked them up and put them on — thinking how quickly time has flown, yet how little has changed since, as a kid during the women’s movement, I considered Steinem to be cooler even than Superwoman.
I walked into the hallway and joked with two women my age about having found Steinem’s iconic shades. They each tried them on, too. We all laughed and shot one another’s pictures, posing like little girls, pretending to be the fearless feminist who was our John Elway.
And then we returned the glasses to their owner, who hadn’t even noticed that she had left them behind.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
