Steinem Learnt From India's Women Movements, Not Gandhi: The 1976 Lesson That Shaped Her Feminism
· World · Indian Express, The Guardian
American feminist Gloria Steinem arrived in India in the late 1970s hoping to build a global blueprint for women's movements using Gandhian non-violent tactics. In 1976, she and co-author Devaki Jain, a Gandhian economist, interviewed Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi and co-founder of the All India Women's Conference, at her New Delhi home. Chattopadhyay told Steinem and Jain that Gandhi himself had been shaped by India's pre-existing women's movements, including the campaign against sati and the suffragists of England whose tactics he urged Indian activists to emulate. She also pointed out that Steinem and Jain had fallen for the 'Great Man Theory', assuming Gandhi's tactics sprang from him rather than from ordinary people. Steinem later wrote about this encounter in her 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, published by Random House, recalling how the conversation reshaped her understanding of feminist organising.
Why it matters
The 1976 conversation in New Delhi redirected Steinem away from personality-driven heroism toward grassroots women's movements, a shift that shaped second-wave American feminism and continues to inform feminist organising today.
Read the original report — Indian Express
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