As a very young woman in the late 1950s, fresh out of college and looking for an excuse to break an engagement to “a good but wrong man,” Gloria Steinem decided to spend two years living in India. Partway through her time there, she joined one of Gandhi’s disciples in an on-the-ground organizing effort to end a series of caste riots in Ramnad, a city in the southeast. For a week, she and her group traveled through the nearby villages, often on foot, attending nighttime meetings where people gathered to tell their stories.
Steinem devotes most of the book to stories about people she’s met during her career as an organizer and activist—not famous people, either, but cabdrivers and flight attendants and college students. Either she kept very good notes or she has amazing powers of recall—or maybe she remembers these conversations so well because of what she learned from them. She doesn’t go unrecognized—many people want to talk to her because she’s Gloria Steinem—but the greatest thrill for her is not being famous but getting to hear what lots of different people, not just policy makers and celebrities, really think.
