geraldine sharpe-newton is an author and Marketing Communications Specialist
From Gloria Steinem to IWF: A Legacy of Women’s Leadership
The Choice Was Ours
When Gloria Steinem first knew me, I was Geri Newton.
More than fifty years later, I understand that this is not an insignificant detail.
I was in my twenties, a young mother in Pittsburgh, living what I thought was the American dream. Home, family, safety. Betty Friedan had already given a name to the unease beneath that apparently perfect picture in The Feminine Mystique. Then came the women’s movement — and Gloria.
What Gloria brought into my life was the idea of choice.
It sounds such an ordinary word now. It wasn’t then.
We could choose whether to have children. We could choose a career. We could want both. We could enter politics, business, journalism — worlds where decisions about us had largely been made by men. We could even change our minds.
The promise wasn’t that every choice would be easy. It was that the choice could be ours.
By 1973, I was a Pittsburgh co-chair of the National Women’s Political Caucus and went to its national gathering in Houston. The Equal Rights Amendment was part of the fight. Curiously, I don’t remember the great convention. I remember a smaller room.
I sat perhaps four rows back, near the aisle, watching Gloria, Shirley Chisholm, Pat Schroeder, Sissy Farenthold and other extraordinary women work through agenda and strategy.
I was overwhelmed.
Suddenly I wasn’t reading about change. I was in the room where women were deciding how to make it happen.
Later, on one of Gloria’s visits to Pittsburgh, I spent several hours alone with her. We talked about politics. Should I run for office? I didn’t think I had the skin for it. To me, politics seemed two steps forward and ten steps backwards.
So we talked about other ways of making a difference. Leadership. Listening — really hearing what another person is saying. And choice.
I cannot remember every word of a conversation held half a century ago. But I remember what I carried away:
Always take another woman’s hand. That is how we will make a difference.
My life moved on — Pittsburgh, New York, then London. Somewhere along the way, Geri Newton morphed into Geraldine Sharpe-Newton.
I used to have a practical explanation. In New York, nobody seemed terribly interested in picking up the telephone to Geri Newton. Geraldine Sharpe-Newton commanded rather more attention.
Now I wonder if something deeper was happening.
I was shedding the safety of home and hearth and the boundaries of the American dream I had thought I wanted. I wasn’t abandoning that young woman. I was discovering there was more of her.
And somewhere inside that discovery was Gloria.
She opened a door. I chose to walk through it.
Decades later, by chance, I saw her in a restaurant. Of course I went over.
“You won’t remember me,” I said, “but what you asked me to do, I did. I’ve always taken another woman’s hand.”
Now Gloria is gone.
For those of us in IWF, her challenge remains. We have made choices our mothers and grandmothers could scarcely have imagined. We have walked through doors. Many of us have opened them.
“Choice gave us power. What we do with that power is our legacy. And we should never walk through a door without reaching back for another woman’s hand.”
Geraldine Sharpe-Newton
