The phone rings and it's not an assistant on the line, it's a global icon. "Hi, this is Gloria Steinem calling for an interview. Am I in the right place?"
At 85, with five decades of activism behind her, Steinem is, by choice, all over the place. She continues to travel constantly – speaking, writing, agitating. She is probably the most famous feminist in the world, although critics point out she never wrote a polemic text like her second-wave sparring partner, the late Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), or third-waver Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth), and she is castigated by some fourth-wave feminists for seeming to underestimate her privilege. Steinem is white, middle-class, prominent and attractive enough to have posed undercover as a Playboy Bunny for a 1963 magazine exposé of Hugh Hefner and his budding empire. She does not have to fight for an audience, and she never has.
The fact that women's reproductive rights – which first sparked what Steinem calls her "active feminism" – are again at risk in the United States does not deflate her as you might imagine. Maybe it is the acceptance of old age, or an example of exceptional emotional intelligence, but she says she gets it.
"It's everything, of course," she says of watching women's hard-won rights being eroded. "It's angering and ridiculous and surrealistic. It's dangerous. It's every possible adjective and adverb."
Then she switches gears, a smooth and practised move that must be utterly disarming when deployed in the face of anger. "[The work] is so interesting and absorbing that I can't imagine wanting to do anything else. It's actually fun to look at a problem or an injustice or an unfairness or an opportunity and think, 'Oh well, if we did this maybe that would happen.' Or, 'We need to get together with these people.'"
Steinem was 22 when she had an illegal abortion. More than a decade later, while covering an abortion speak-out for New York Magazine, she experienced her "big click" moment, when she realised that feminist activism was where she wanted to devote her energy and intellect.
"I think in the beginning, [abortion rights] seemed to me and others like sweet reason," she says. "If we look at it politically, in the deepest sense, it's that we are able to make decisions over what happens with our own bodies. That should be the basis of democracy.
"We have gradually come to see how radical it is, in the true sense of the word. There is huge opposition to it because it comes from both the patriarchy and from a racist society – because if you can't control reproduction, you can't keep races separate."
Steinem has had the pleasure of watching feminism shift from a fringe fight to a mainstream concern in her lifetime, thanks in no small part to her own efforts to shine a light on absurdities and injustices. With African-American activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes, she co-founded Ms magazine in 1971, wholly staffed and led by women, which published groundbreaking stories on working mothers, domestic violence, financial freedom, sexual harassment and yes, abortion.
Back then she had to put up with ridiculous questions from other journalists about why she dressed so "sexily" in jeans, leotard tops and big glasses, and who she was dating. It must have been infuriating, but she employed a charm and humour that allowed her to present then-radical ideas as reasonable and cut through the rubbish. Once told during an interview, "You're an absolutely stunning sex object," she replied, "Well, I should comment on your appearance, but I don't have the time."
Now, she thinks of herself as a torchbearer, and rather than passing her torch on to one woman, she is using it to light many torches.
"Speaking for the United States at least, all of the social justice movements, from the environment to civil rights to feminism, have changed the majority opinion, which is a good thing. But there's about 30 or 40 per cent of the country that feels deprived of an old hierarchy and are mad as hell, you know? So they are supporting our accidental President Trump and behaving badly. So it is both a victory and a danger. I think that's something we only lately learned – that right after a victory is the time of danger."
Trump, after all, was caught on tape boasting about sexually assaulting women (kissing them without consent and grabbing them "by the p....") and was still elected to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. That his behaviour did not automatically exclude him from serious contention remains breathtaking, three years after the fact.
While Steinem says she is regularly challenged by "entitled" middle-aged men who feel like their jobs have been "taken" by women and minorities, she is heartened by the amount of activism she sees everywhere she goes. She reckons it is time to stop trying to bring everyone along on the journey towards true equality; some dudes just won't get on the bus.
"Women have to realise it doesn't have to be unanimous," she says. "Our model of leadership or governance is the family, which has to include everybody, so sometimes I worry that if you have 500 people on one side of the room ready to go and 100 on the other side saying no, we would try to convince the 100 instead of moving forward with the 500."
When asked about the #MeToo movement, and the unease of those who believe it may victimise innocent men, she laughs. "A man who does something wrong or insulting or hurtful may very well say, 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean it,' and all kinds of things, which means that change is happening. But men who are obsessed with power actually deny any wrongdoing and turn the victim into the accuser, so you can learn a lot from the way men respond.
"If it's unfair, they should definitely say it's unfair. We are striving to be accurate and compassionate here – we don't want a world without accuracy and compassion – but I think we have to look at each instance. Men too, because they have been raised in this culture that gives them messages of privilege and possession."
In the past, Steinem has been vocal in her opposition to cosmetic procedures used by women to conform to beauty standards that celebrate youth and sideline older women. These days she is more careful in the way she frames that criticism, making it clear that it is the link between a woman's perceived worth and her appearance that peeves her, not the women who take the step of trying to beautify themselves.
"If the woman is an actor or a model or some profession that depends on how she looks, I have a lot of empathy for what she has to do. I don't have to, thank God. I would not look forward to unnecessary surgery myself, but I think we have to listen to each other."
She is equally unruffled by the brand of "feminism" practised by prominent women like the Kardashians, who run beauty and fashion empires that trade on the notion of female empowerment – owning your sexuality, for example. Kim Kardashian even launched a pack of emojis, or "Kimojis", on International Women's Day last year featuring the slogan "full-time feminist", arguably reducing a basic human right to a money-making opportunity. Kimojis in the past have included images of Kardashian's butt and crying face.
"I think if they were feminists, they would say so," Steinem deadpans. (For the record, Kim Kardashian has changed her former declaration that she's not a feminist, now saying that she is one "in her soul".)
She probably won't be here to see the fifth wave of feminism unfold, but she hopes it is concerned with drawing together the slippery strands of oppression – sexual harassment, pay inequity, racial discrimination, violence against women – and cutting down the whole monster. "What we have not done is make connections," she says. "Issues and concerns tend to rise up in streams, so we talk about [them] as if they were separate and I think now we are more than ready to make connections."
It comes back to talking to each other – and listening. Respectful conversation is the way forward for feminism now, as it was 50 years ago, says Steinem. "We need to remember to listen as much as we talk, especially if we are in a place where we might have a little bit more power than other people, and to talk as much as we listen, especially if we have less power than the people around us."
