Chapter 1

Bad Things I’m Glad Happened to Me

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe. —­David Hare, A Map of the World

In the first half of my life, I counted as useful only the many good things that happened to me. For instance, both my parents were loving and respectful of the unique self within each of their two very different daughters, born nine years apart. My older sister was blond and blue-­eyed, and longed for a married life after her rewarding career as a gemologist. Indeed, she did marry and have six children.

As a teenager, I had an impractical fantasy of tap-­dancing my way into the future, since show business seemed the most likely path out of East Toledo, though I knew I wasn’t good enough for a career. Instead, I went to college and, after graduation in 1956, got a fellowship that allowed me to study in India, where I stayed for two years. I fell in love with that country for its ancient diversity as much as for its then modern rebellion against colonialism. I felt inspired by the independence movement that had been slowed but not eliminated by Mahatma’s Gandhi’s assassination. I also loved wearing saris, as well as the easier salwar kameez, and living in student dormitories. For free, I was able to audit classes at a university. I can’t say I learned much, since my academic studies were then still devoted mostly to a curriculum from England, but I did learn about the universality of human aspiration.

I’m still grateful to the students at Miranda House, a women’s college at the University of Delhi, who accepted me as a foreign student and took me with them on their coffeehouse adventures. To my surprise, I found that I felt at home. I had spent my junior year of college in Geneva, Switzerland, and had traveled around Europe, but not until India had I ever felt as comfortable in any country not my own. While traveling alone in India, I found I had less to worry about, in part because, as a woman, I had the advantage of special seats in restaurants and railroad cars. Once I knew about those opportunities, I just had to relax and enjoy them.

In New Delhi, I saw up close what massive poverty looked like. I also witnessed what a national movement, started by women and taken up by Gandhi, was doing to release people from the bonds of caste, sex, and economic and colonial dependency as well as British rule. In the villages surrounding Delhi, I was welcomed with warmth and curiosity, and saw the pride that came with independence. For instance, shoemakers were considered one of the lowest professions because they worked with animal hides, but when a shoemaker began to repair a village’s only street after he had seen that initiative being taken in a neighboring village, others began to help him. Soon the street was no longer a slough, but a neatly bricked thoroughfare.

My second year there allowed me to move around more of the country and learn. I traveled safely in the women-­only compartments of third-­class trains, and stayed for very little money in student hostels. When I ran out of money, I got the courage to submit essays to Indian newspapers, written as a foreign observer. Surprisingly, some were accepted and I was paid small sums.

One of the articles I published in India, “In the Camp of the Radical Humanists,” described my observing a study camp in the hills of Mussoorie. The radical humanists, a group of gentle activists and intellectuals, taught that the means we choose dictate the ends we achieve. In other words, the means are the ends. The experience caused me to rethink my romance with Marxism, which had started in college when Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of actual or imagined Communists made Marxists seem admirable by comparison.

My time in newly independent India also gave me faith in the power of social justice movements. From listening to the radical humanists’ analysis of world events, I learned that radical didn’t mean violent, extremist, or crazy, as reading some of our U.S. newspapers had led me to believe. It could mean exactly what the dictionary said: “going to the root.”

When I was in a village in Ramnad, a rural territory in southern India, for instance, I happened upon a few Gandhians who were walking from village to village, trying to quell caste riots that had resulted from a disputed distribution of land. This group invited me to join their efforts and assured me that a foreigner in a sari wouldn’t seem any odder to villagers than a visitor from New Delhi or Bombay. More important, local women would be more likely to join campfire meetings if another woman was present. I traveled with the Gandhi­ans to rural areas, and people came out of their com­pounds and sat in a circle together at night talking around a campfire.

In this way, I began to witness some universal truths of organizing:

If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.

If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.

If you want to encourage meetings, you have to go where people are.

By the time I got home after two years of learning about and loving India, the civil rights movement was just beginning. It was to be followed by the feminist movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and other movements expressing the idea that each person is unique and valuable.

Also, India had taught me that real change is like a tree—­it grows from the bottom up—­and that I could survive as a writer, provided I didn’t require much. Both realizations encouraged me to keep trying to do what I loved.

I realized that whatever happens, life is about learning; even painful events can be grist for the mill of understanding and for writing. This lightbulb moment led me to look again at many events of my life. Though we tend to measure events as good or bad, pleasurable or painful, a more meaningful measure might be: What did I learn?

In Praise of the Accidental

We can’t control what happens, but we can use what happens. From the choices other people make to those we make ourselves, we must look for chances to bring together the disparate. For instance, the pandemic was a giant accident that affected almost all of us. It did everything from changing our handwashing habits to increasing the number of homeschooled children, from limiting our global travel to closing our beloved theaters. The pandemic was and is sad and frightening, yet it brought a new sense of concern and connection among us. It also created a mutuality and many new opportunities that didn’t go unnoticed or untaken. Even separated, people hung out of their windows to sing and shout together. On television we saw news anchors in their living rooms, and online we saw friends and neighbors at home with books and dogs and children.

After all, a pandemic is, if anything, democratic. The virus didn’t care about race, age, class, or sexuality. There is a lack of democracy in our healthcare system, yet the little spiky organism is the same, from the United States to India. Regardless of where we were in any hierarchy, mask wearing and awareness of the people you hugged became the shared order of the day. It imposed, at least temporarily, more egalitarian ways of thinking and being.

So the question is: Can our pandemic experience continue the good news of our shared humanity? Certainly, this possibility comes at a moment of heightened need, especially in the United States, to realize how much we share as individuals. Our country is at a time of maximum danger, in part because, for the first time since European settlers and invaders arrived, we are close to becoming evenly divided between so-­called white people and people of color. While many people, myself included, celebrate this evolution as a joining of the rest of the world, others fear it. Racial distinctions should be meaningless, since the amount of melanin in our skin makes no difference, yet colorism and the myths of race have been used to create social divisions, wars, and residential separations. I don’t mean to sound didactic, but to preserve any racial hierarchy, you need the illusion of a so-­called racial purity, which requires that women in any “superior” group be controlled by men of their group. It’s this mentality that brought us “MAGA moms” and “trad wives.” Yet often when we are experiencing maximum danger, it also means we are about to be free.

Indeed, the racist cry of “You will not replace us” was invented by a fearful minority of white people and helped to twice elect an incompetent white president named Donald Trump—­though he is still opposed by the majority of the New York City neighbors who knew him best.

The pandemic remains a big and historic moment. In making us all vulnerable, the pandemic gave us gifts of everything from increasing public support for universal healthcare to exposing the impossibility of dividing ourselves by race, class, or gender.

Excerpted from AN UNEXPECTED LIFE by Gloria Steinem. Copyright © 2026 by Gloria Steinem. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.