Moving beyond words

Gloria Steinem is one of the country's most influential and innovative writers and activists. In Revolution from Within, Marilyn: Norma Jean, and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, she created a dialogue with her readers that shapes the way we think about human possibilities. In this newest six-part adventure of essays that "begin in a personal place, and arrive at a larger point," she offers more revolutionary ideas, compassionate insights, and one truly over-the-top fantasy. Three of its six parts appear here for the first time. Three of them have a seed, seedling, or partly grown plant in a previously published article. As Steinem writes in the Preface, "Each of these six parts is rather like a condensed book....Since there seems to be no genre for this, I've found myself explaining it this way: If you added water to any of these parts, it would become a book." . What If Freud Were Phyllis is the ultimate send-up - with footnotes. By gender-reversing Sigmund's world and work, and drawing on new scholarship that shocks, Steinem creates a hilarious and chilling portrait of the most haunting father-figure of them all - and raises questions about what might have been haunting him, and why he is still haunting us. The Strongest Woman in the World is the story of one woman whose courage in testing her own limits broke the boundaries of gender and gave Steinem insights into the politics of muscle - and into herself. Sex, Lies and Advertising updates and greatly expands Steinem's famous expose of advertising's stranglehold on women's magazines and its control over much of what we see and read - with a new and urgent call to action. The Masculinization of Wealth shows us the ways class works in reverse for women in families of inherited wealth, because "the closer we are to power, the more passive we have to be kept." It reshapes our understanding of class, and exposes the other end of the feminization of poverty. Revaluing Economics demystifies budgets, from our own checkbooks to national and international accounting systems, as statements of values that render invisible most of the world's productive work, especially that done by women - and offers practical ways out. Doing Sixty is a spirited, provocative, intimate essay written at the approach of Steinem's sixtieth birthday - for her "beloved age peers" and "to help younger readers worry less about early successes or failures" - as she realizes why women, herself included, become more radical with age.