Behind the scenes at the March for Women's Lives

[Robbien]

April 26, 2004 | WASHINGTON -- Gloria Steinem, the feminist, writer and founder of Ms. magazine, was gliding up the stairs behind me. Dressed in fitted black pants and a top, her colorless hair long and recently washed, a brown leather knapsack thrown over her shoulders, and her big trademark brown-tinted sunglasses, the impossibly slim Steinem looked like she had stepped directly out of 1978. Mandell and other organizers greeted her warmly and were ushering her into the party when a young Asian woman, who looked to be in her early 20s, stopped still on the way down the hall. "Are you -- are you Gloria Steinem?" she stuttered. When Steinem, who last month turned 70, answered in the affirmative and shook her hand, the woman simply held it, shocked. "Oh! Oh my god! I love you!" she said.

It was a moment that very much captured the spirit of this weekend in Washington. Part reunion tour, part celebrity-sighting smorgasbord, part multigenerational get-to-know-you session, the march and its party-studded lead-up were filled with equal parts blank looks and rapturous handshakes, as the women's movement -- all three or four or five generations of it -- gathered en masse for the first time since 1992 to rally for the protection of women's health and reproductive rights. And as the march sponsors grappled for attention and mingled as longtime sisters-in-arms, there was a lot of staring going on: 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and teenagers and feminist heroes and grandmothers and children all gaping at each other, wondering if they had enough in common to reinvigorate a movement that has lain fallow for over a decade.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/04/26/womens_march/index_np.html

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