More Obituaries in the News

Noted jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, 70, died earlier this week:

Cassandra Marie Fowlkes was born on December 4, 1955, in Jackson, Mississippi. Music was already part of the family. Her father, Herman Fowlkes, was a jazz and blues guitarist and music teacher, while her mother, Mary McDaniel, loved Motown.

Wilson studied piano as a child, later learned guitar and clarinet, and absorbed music from many directions. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell could sit alongside jazz, blues and the sounds she heard growing up in Mississippi.

After moving toward the New York jazz scene in the early 1980s, she became associated with saxophonist Steve Coleman and was a founding member of the experimental M-Base Collective.

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 Just three days after her feminist colleague Gloria Steinem had died, Robin Morgan, 85, passed away.  She was one of the original second-wave feminists and perhaps best known for editing the classic anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful.  

Morgan started out in show business as a child actress.  Her best known role was playing Dagmar, the youngest daughter, in the live television series Mama, during the years 1950-1956.  Morgan left the series before it ended.

Her son, Blake, said this:

"My mother Robin Morgan died peacefully in her sleep early this morning. Surely, she will be remembered for designing the iconic image of the women's movement (the fist in the circle of the women's symbol) and for her formative anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful, for co-founding the Sisterhood is Global Institute with Simone de Beauvoir, for co-founding the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, for a lifetime of fierce feminism and fierce friendship. But first and foremost, she was an artist. Her art fueled her politics, fueled her feminism, fueled the way she raised me. She taught me that how one does anything is how one does everything—that the personal is the political, and that as she once wrote, 'Hate generalizes, love specifies.' I'll have more to say and more songs to write about her, but for now, I'll express my love and gratitude that so many of you knew and loved her as both my mother, and as your friend."

Guardian:

Her legacy was one of deeds, words and images. Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory”, the feminist reworking of “history”, and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement. Her poem Monster, with such lines as “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it” was quoted at feminist rallies and beyond. Her poem Arraignment helped capture the movement’s embrace of the late Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide in 1963. Morgan’s rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth’s song J’Accuse Ted Hughes.

Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant garde Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs.

Obituary: Gloria Steinem

 Longtime second-wave feminist, writer, and co-founder of Ms. magazine Gloria Steinem, 92, passed away yesterday at her New York apartment.  There was no cause of death given.  The announcement of her death noted she was surrounded by many of the friends she had over the years.

It is hard to overstate just how important a figure she was.   She started as a journalist, but she came of age in the 1950s, and with it were attitudes that said women couldn't do this or that, or, if they aspired to be writers, especially in the newspaper field, they were relegated to writing features, especially on the so-called "women's pages."  During this time, she went "undercover" working as a Playboy bunny for a magazine called Show.  The resulting article made her famous.

Steinem later co-founded New York magazine, which was the magazine that highlighted the premiere issue of Ms.  Steinem, with several other women, founded the long-running magazine.  Steinem also found time for activism on behalf of women's rights and wrote several books, one of which will be published later this month.  

Ms. had its share of critics including some feminists who thought it didn't go far enough and from sexist jerks like broadcast journalist Harry Reasoner, who barely hid his contempt for the magazine.  Ms.  survived and continues to survive but for many years through a non-profit foundation.

Because Gloria Steinem in her younger days looked like a fashion model and worse yet, was articulate, she elicited a lot of hostility from people like Betty Friedan, who although a very good writer, wasn't photogenic and simply wasn't articulate.  There was also a tale spread around by I think the Redstockings, a radical feminist group in its heyday of the late sixties and early seventies and still exists today, which made insinuations Gloria Steinem was somehow a tool of the CIA.  In reality, early on she worked for an outfit that had some connections with the  governmental organization, but she wasn't a spy or any of that other bullshit.

From Wikipedia:

In 1967, Steinem revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she worked full time from 1958 until 1962 at the Independent Research Service, which was largely financed by the CIA.^[113] In May 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, published a report put together for the Independent Research Service by Steinem and others on the Vienna Youth Festival and its attendees.^[114][115] Redstockings raised the question of whether Steinem had continuing ties with the CIA, which Steinem denied.^[116] Steinem defended her relationship to the CIA, saying: "In my experience the agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."^[76] Steinem also stated that she considered the CIA allies in promoting U.S. government policy against communism during the early Cold War.^[117]

Redstockings was full of shit with its innuendo, but somehow in some quarters the fairytale  Steinem was a spy  is still being spewed. It doesn't even make sense.  If she had ever been a spy or something nefarious, she would not have disclosed it in the first place.  Redstockings were a bunch of paranoid idiots on this story.  Undoubtedly, it was rooted in envy.  Anyway, envy is a nasty character trait, and feminists weren't immune to it.

NYT obit:

Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, the daughter of Leo and Ruth (Nuneviller) Steinem. Her free-spirited father, whom she adored, was a peripatetic antiques dealer, a big dreamer with no money.

“He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink,” Ms. Steinem told Time magazine in 1969.

...

When Gloria was about 10, her parents divorced, and her 19-year-old sister, Susanne, left for Smith College in Massachusetts. Gloria and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo where Ruth had once lived. Gloria’s life was consumed by caring for her mother, by then a meek and fearful woman who was addicted to sodium thiopental. She was “an invalid,” Ms. Steinem later wrote, “who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.”

Gloria shopped, prepared meals and tended to Ruth for seven years, until her senior year of high school, when they sold the house, saving the money for Gloria’s college tuition. Gloria spent her senior year living with her sister in Washington, D.C., while Ruth went to California, where she was cared for by her ex-husband.

While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.

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Unfortunately, the author resorts to some 1950s bullshit about how Gloria taking care of her mother somehow "colored" her views on marriage and children.

For fuck's sake, people have the right to live the lives they want without somebody second-guessing them.

On the other hand, I didn't know Gloria Steinem was mostly self-taught before going into college.