See, this is why people love her so much. She made the case for the women's movement, she stayed active and provocative, and now, in her eighth decade, she's hanging around with all the people she ever slept with (at least the ones who are still alive).
She sounds as sharp as ever, with a hearty and generous laugh, giving the lie as she always did to the worn cliche of a humorless female crusader, still holding on to her same natural beauty and her defense of it (never spend more than 15 minutes a day on your looks was a credo many took to heart; plastic surgery to her is basically a racist idea). She's still an icon, manning the feminist flag she insists plenty of people still proudly fly.
Yes, Gloria Steinem is 77. Seventy-seven!
"Imagine how shocked I am!" she said over the phone, a conversation delayed an hour as she completed errands in and around her Manhattan home in advance of travels that will include a stop at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women on Tuesday.
"It's, I don't know, you hear your age, you think it's somebody else's age. It feels great. Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!"
For Steinem, aging itself has been a revelation, an act of her body reclaiming the autonomy she has long urged for women.
"It's interesting to watch your body do something it knows how to do, and you don't," she said. "It's like being pregnant, I assume. What happens at 50, more or less, you lose what you need to create another person, to sustain another person, you keep what you need to sustain yourself. And there's something wonderful about that."
