3.5. Review to come!
***
I kept seeing girls and women who were smart, courageous, and valuable but who didn't think they were smart, courageous, or valuable.
I bought this book a few years ago when I saw that there was a 2020 reprint. This is certainly one of those books that I wished I read earlier. I love Gloria Steinem's writing style, and similar to bell hooks, I deeply appreciated her taking the opportunity when it arose to dispel feminist anachronisms or historical falsities, because it was usually something that I had heard, so it was good to have it addressed. In the first chapter, she describes how feminists were "already being misrepresented in the media as white, middle class, and frivolous, a caricature that even then I knew was wrong: the first feminists I had heard of in the sixties were working-class women who broke the sex barrier in factory assembly lines..."
This book on self-esteem has aged well in that most of Steinem's conclusions have an intersectional and equitable lens to it. I loved the first few chapters, as Steinem shares her personal stories in relation to self-esteem effectively. I don't like self-help books where authors take it as free license to write indulgent confessionals, especially when the books are marketed as self-help as opposed to autobiography/memoir. I loved the examples that she shared about California's Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, the junior high school chess team in New York's Spanish Harlem.
My favourite chapters were the first two on what is self-esteem and a happy childhood. As the chapters progressed, some of the information I had heard before, and was highly reminiscent of online discourse around decolonizing your mind. The chapters on the importance of unlearning is a frustrating but highly educational chapter on science and how it was "expected to become society's explainers, justifiers, and providers of rules. If converting the heathen to Christianity was no longer a sufficient rationale for the colonialism that had become the pillar of European prosperity, for instance, then science was expected to supply equally compelling reasons why such a system was positive, progressive, and 'for their own good.'" Steinem discusses this though craniology as well as through the IQ test.
In terms of what to expect, Steinem says in the new preface that she wrote this book because she was looking for books to recommend to girls and women but they were either spiritual books that did not acknowledge the political dimension to self-esteem issues, or girlbossy books that just focused on external success as the path to self-esteem. In this book, Steinem tries to balance in her own way these two wants, and in my perspective, she succeeds. Some people may be more sensitive and get frustrated, but for myself, as someone who is a yoga teacher who works with different audiences (some more open to spiritual perspective, some less), Steinem does a good job of being respectful without watering her perspective down.
Some of my favourite quotes:
People seemed to stop punishing others or themselves only when they gained some faith in their own unique, intrinsic worth.
We should be allowed to progress in whatever direction we have not been. For me, this meant traveling inward. For others, it may be the reverse.
As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.
The most often heard sentiment had been: 'It's always been like this; nothing will change.' N
ow, it was: 'Look what we've done; what else could we take on?'
But the point of the journey is not just healing. It's also rediscovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.