Remember the time the world’s most famous feminist implied that young women liked Bernie Sanders more than Hillary Clinton basically because they wanted to chase men?
Probably not.
But in February 2016, Gloria Steinem, who died on Wednesday, went on “Real Time With Bill Maher” and made a statement that seemed decidedly sexist.
Mr. Maher asked Ms. Steinem about Mr. Sanders’s outsize support during his presidential campaign from young voters — including young women.
“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’” Ms. Steinem said.
It was, in retrospect, a weird time, 10 years and forever ago.
Conventional wisdom said Donald Trump would never become the Republican nominee, let alone the president, let alone twice. Conventional wisdom said Mr. Sanders, the democratic socialist insurgent and independent senator from Vermont, surely would soon fade in his race against Mrs. Clinton — seen as the Democrats’ inevitable pick, and probably the first female commander in chief.
Back then, many people struggled to see the tectonic shifts underway — much less explain them. Still, from Ms. Steinem, the embodiment of the modern women’s movement and a self-described “entrepreneur of social change,” the comment made for an unexpected assessment.
“It was insulting,” Nina Turner, one of Mr. Sanders’s most prominent and vociferous surrogates in his 2016 campaign, said in an interview on Thursday.
“Both to the senator and his policy positions that are very good for women, and also insulting to the women,” Ms. Turner said. “As if they were just some airhead ditties who were just out searching for men, and the best way to get them was to support Senator Bernie Sanders, or go to his rallies and flirt.”
Navigating gender politics was a persistent theme in that election, even beyond Ms. Steinem’s entry into the debate. Many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters were derogatorily called “Bernie Bros” for their aggressive online attacks against female reporters and supporters of Mrs. Clinton.
Ms. Steinem had been a consistent and outspoken supporter of Mrs. Clinton — in her first presidential bid in 2008, and in her second run in 2016, too.
Critics ignored the broader context of her appearance on Mr. Maher’s show.
Ms. Steinem said that young women were “very activist” and “way more feminist” than they had been in the past.
“They’re mad as hell because they’re graduating in debt, and they’re going to earn a million dollars less over their lifetimes to pay it back,” she said.
“Men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women get more radical because they lose power as they age,” she said.
But then she said what she said, and she stopped herself and laughed nervously. Mr. Maher pounced.
“Now, if I said that, you’d swat me,” he said, punctuating his remarks with an expletive.
In the ensuing hubbub, Ms. Steinem tried to backtrack and mitigate.
“I misspoke,” she wrote in a post on Facebook. “What I had just said on the same show was the opposite,” she said. “Whether they gravitate to Bernie or Hillary, young women are activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before.”
“What I was thinking sitting there,” she said in an email to Katha Pollitt, a feminist and polemicist, writing for The Nation, “was that both young women and young men gravitate toward each other, and here, for a shared reason — Bernie makes an economic message like that of Occupy.” (Remember Occupy, the even longer-ago protest movement against wealth disparity?)
“No one is ever smarter from going on Bill Maher,” Ms. Pollitt said in an interview on Thursday. “There’s something about that show that gets people to say kind of extreme and not very careful things.”
Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist on Mr. Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said, “From my perspective, I didn’t see that as some kind of damning comment about Gloria Steinem and her record as a feminist leader.”
“That really wasn’t the political impact of it,” he continued. “It was that her candidate was just getting killed among younger voters, and she was trying to come up with a reason why.”
Mostly undiscussed in the ephemeral dust-up was an equally interesting and arguably more revealing snippet of history: the time the world’s most famous feminist traveled to Vermont — to stump for Mr. Sanders.
In October 1996, he was running for re-election to Congress against a woman, Susan Sweetser, and a featured speaker at a campaign event at the University of Vermont to spotlight his support from women was none other than Ms. Steinem.
In his 1997 book, “Outsider in the House,” Mr. Sanders wrote that Ms. Steinem’s remarks were “both analytic and deeply radical.” He said she told more than 500 people “that it is no accident that there is a feeling of discouragement and disillusionment in America today” because “Republicans, the right wing, the press with its insistence on sensationalism are all powerful forces that are changing the nature of politics.”
“I’m only here,” Ms. Steinem said to the crowd, “to make Bernie Sanders an honorary woman.”
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