Gloria Steinem

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the activist and writer Gloria Steinem.

Presenter0:38

A world renowned feminist, she has spent the past forty five years thinking, writing, and talking about equality. Her logic's unimpeachable, her books are bestsellers, her lecture tours packed out, and yet the movement she's championed still has a pretty long to do list. Domestic violence, the pay gap, reproductive freedom. It would seem that even now feminism continues to be a work in progress.

Presenter1:03

Challenging convention isn't something she chose rather, it was part of her very beginnings. An itinerant childhood was spent travelling the highways and byways of America, following her father's restless, deep seated desire to always move on. She was twelve before she completed a full year in school.

Presenter1:22

She says, I'm a realist, but I'm also a dreamer, and I'm not just a dreamer, I'm a hopaholic. So welcome, Gloria Steinem. Um how much have your early nineteen seventies hopes and dreams of what feminism could deliver for women come to fruition?

Gloria Steinem1:40

I think my dreams at that point were not big enough. I think I was looking at equality, not transformation. And on the one hand, my dreams and ideas have become bigger. And therefore, I think it's even more important than I did before, to make a society in which the paradigm is the circle, not a pyramid, and we understand we are linked, we are not ranked. On the other hand, I realize what a huge victory it is just to know we're not crazy.

Gloria Steinem2:18

Because in the beginning just the idea of equal pay or you know the most basic things were considered to be crazy because they were thought to be dictated by biology.

Presenter2:28

How much is it a concern of yours that the people who put your books at the top of the New York Times bestseller list or the people who pay to come and watch you lectures are pretty much people who kind of agree with you and think the same thing?

Gloria Steinem2:42

What you say I think is mitigated by hostility and curiosity.

Gloria Steinem2:48

Both forces that drive people into big auditoriums and so on. So you do get people who can come along and challenge you for yourself. Yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And pickets and people who question and are mad and and also, but most importantly, I think people who are just curious.

Presenter2:54

Yeah.

Presenter3:05

Yeah.

Gloria Steinem3:05

You're very well known, of course, as

Presenter3:06

As a public speaker, but I've read you say that actually it's as it's public listening that has taught you much in your life. Tell me more about that. What do you mean?

Gloria Steinem3:16

Well, I was a writer because I wanted to avoid speaking in public. And only when I couldn't get published what I thought was most exciting in the exploding women's movement did I end up going out with a friend who was fearless and becoming a speaker. In retrospect, I'm really, really grateful for that because otherwise I would never have discovered that something magic happens when you're all in a room together. People will stand up and say, in the force field of hundreds or even a couple thousand people.

Gloria Steinem3:49

Things they wouldn't say to their family or best friend. It's as if it makes an energy field.

Presenter3:53

Let's go to the music, Gloria Steinem. Tell me about your first disc of the morning then. Um what is it and why have you chosen it?

Gloria Steinem3:59

Well, downtown, which I bet lots of people listening already know, Petulia Clark, I must have worn out at least two, maybe three old-fashioned discs because it reminded me of my years of, say, eleven to twelve through sixteen or seventeen when Saturday was the day I could escape home, and home was kind of not always so great because my mother was not always able to take care of herself, so I was often her caretaker. And on Saturday afternoon, I could go meet a girlfriend at the movies and just completely lose myself.

Gloria Steinem4:42

And this song, it just evokes that kind of longing for me.

Speaker 34:48

When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go.

Speaker 34:54

Downtown, when you've got worries all the noise and the hurry seems to help unknow.

Speaker 35:02

Downtown, just listen to the music of the traffic in the city. Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty. How can you lose?

Gloria Steinem5:11

Seprey.

Speaker 45:11

Uh

Gloria Steinem5:11

Behind

Speaker 35:15

The light's so much brighter there You can't forget all your troubles Forget all your cares

Presenter5:24

That was Petula Clark and Downtown. So Gloria Steinem, um feminism then appears to be experiencing right now I don't know if it's a third wave, I don't know if it's a fourth wave, but there's certainly a wave happening right now.

Gloria Steinem5:34

Yes, absolutely. There was a huge explosion of consciousness and activism.

Presenter5:35

And the push.

Presenter5:39

Yeah, it wasn't there twenty years ago when I was a young woman. What do you put it down to?

Gloria Steinem5:40

Wasn't there twenty

Gloria Steinem5:43

Well, it was always present. I think it's partly the web, you know, because you get all these ideas and information without the context of how old the person who said it was. You get each other's stories. There's a wave of activism against sexual assault on campus and the armed services. You know, there's just a lot, a lot, a lot of energy and hope.

Presenter6:07

Do you believe I mean that sort of contemporary activism, so much of which happens digitally online, which is known I think as clicktivism in some circles, you know, it's much easier, isn't it, to just click on a petition and say, I agree with that. Yeah, there I am. Do you think that's a good idea?

Gloria Steinem6:19

Do you think it's not? I mean, pressing send is not activism. Okay, so what is activism? But it is the fuel for activism because you're learning that other people feel the same as you do, that other people are experiencing the same injustice, and if you get together, you can change it. How do

Presenter6:37

you and goodness knows you must have come up against it over the years combat and I'm talking just here about maybe in s you know, in social circumstances where you might be at a drinks party or sitting next to somebody at dinner who says but you know, if you take all the differences away, Gloria, between the sexes, you take all the fun out of life.

Gloria Steinem6:55

Hmm.

Presenter6:55

What do you say to that?

Gloria Steinem6:57

Well, I say, depending on how patient I am that each of us is in fact a unique miracle of

Gloria Steinem7:08

Heredity and environment combined m millennia of heredity and environment combine in a way that could never have happened before and could never happen again.

Gloria Steinem7:19

And we are all human beings. So to release the uniqueness is the important difference. To divide us into groups by race, by class, by gender, is false. We share 99% of everything as human beings. Why on earth would you put us in a box and give us a different label? It's a deprivation, even if people are in the best box.

Gloria Steinem7:47

It's still a deprivation.

Presenter7:50

Let's have some more music. Tell me about your second disc this morning. What are we going to hear next?

Gloria Steinem7:55

Well, you know, this uh Judy Collins' song, My Father, is about her own father, but it's also about my father, and my father was a dreamer, as was hers.

Gloria Steinem8:11

And it made me sad for him because his dreams were not realized. He died alone. But on the other hand, I know the dream was what was important to him.

Speaker 48:21

My father always promised us that we would live in France.

Speaker 48:33

We'd go boating on the sand

Speaker 48:38

And I would learn to dance.

Speaker 48:45

We lived in Ohio then.

Speaker 48:51

He worked in the middle sweet.

Presenter9:00

There was Judy Collins with My Father indeed written for her father, but you were saying Gloria Steiner. Much of the the lyric in that could be equally applied to your own father. When I read about your early childhood

Gloria Steinem9:08

Yeah.

Presenter9:12

To be honest, I am perplexed as to how to sum it up, and so I'm going to ask you to sum it up because it was so unusual. Can you describe it?

Speaker 49:17

Uh

Gloria Steinem9:17

Yes, it's so it was so un

Gloria Steinem9:22

Uh

Gloria Steinem9:24

Well, I would say first and most importantly that my parents loved me and treated me better than they treated themselves. I mean, I knew they were doing the best they could.

Gloria Steinem9:36

That meant that I was going with both parents and a house trailer and traveling.

Presenter9:43

And traveling would mean I mean, y your father had a small business which he had dreams of growing, which was sort of little entertainment complex.

Gloria Steinem9:50

Yeah, he had a summer resort in in southern Michigan on a freshwater lake and one day it would get just too cold and he couldn't bear it anymore, so he would suddenly pile us all in the house trailer and

Gloria Steinem10:01

The dog and, you know, five frying pans and one plate. I mean, we never quite got it right as we were leaving. And he had small antiques and jewelry that he would buy and sell to roadside dealers. And we stayed in trailer parks. And sometimes if we were flush, then we would stay in a motel so we could all have hot baths and kind of worked our way to California or to Florida in the warm weather.

Presenter10:26

And your father had come from an upper middle class Jewish background. Why did he want to live this life?

Gloria Steinem10:34

That's a good question. You know, I think.

Gloria Steinem10:36

His parents were immigrants who needed to create a secure life because they had not had it. And it was so secure that all I remember about it is a completely neat apartment and a ticking clock on the mantelpiece. And I think that it was just too secure and boring for my father. How did you, for example, say, I don't know, learn to read if you weren't going to school?

Presenter10:59

Wait.

Gloria Steinem10:59

Yep.

Presenter10:59

Parents educating you?

Gloria Steinem11:01

You know, first of all, there were lots of books in the house. They both especially my mother adored books. And she, as I discovered later, had been a very rare pioneering woman journalist quite a while before I was born. And I can remember taking a pencil and scribbling and saying, Look, mommy, I'm writing. I mean, I wasn't, you know, but I was already trying to write.

Gloria Steinem11:25

And I I learned to read from Heinz ketchup bottle labels, from billboards along the side of the road, and at nine reading adult novels, I had no business.

Presenter11:37

Let's have some more music, Gloria Steinem. Tell me about your third of the morning. What are we going to hear now?

Gloria Steinem11:43

Well, this is still while I'm a teenager and living with my mother by ourselves. My parents had separated. My father was living out of his car in the West Coast. We were in Toledo, in Ohio. And the zoo, relatively near, had an outdoor amphitheater. And there there were operettas in the summertime. And the singing chorus and the dancing chorus was hired locally. So at something like 13 or 14, I lied myself up to eighteen because I was already very tall by that time and danced in the chorus, you know, with occasional lions roaring and seals in the background. You know, it was quite wonderful summer outdoor entertainment. And Naughty Marietta was one of those, and I still remember a little bit of the steps.

Speaker 412:44

I'm very good indeed.

Speaker 412:50

But when I am bad, I'm horrid.

Speaker 412:57

Not the merry eta come be good, says she.

Speaker 413:06

Don't think more in act of what you should say. She got

Speaker 413:14

At the Congo Hotel, she smelled the marriage. She said they were not better. They could message her.

Presenter13:42

Naughty Marietta sung by Anamoffo from Victor Herbert's operetta of the same name, with lyrics by Rita Johnson Young. You were saying during that Gloria Steinem that you have memories of, you know, the sort of baskets and the hoops. Yes, the face

Gloria Steinem13:53

Yes, yes, carrying little baskets with phony flowers, running on tippy toe and then pointing at the table.

Presenter14:01

Tell me more, then, about your mother. She had been, as you say, she was a newspaper reporter, and then even a young editor at one point.

Gloria Steinem14:09

Yes, I believe she was Sunday editor before she left.

Presenter14:12

Remarkable. I mean this would have been the 1920s.

Gloria Steinem14:13

In the 1920s. In the twenties or perhaps just over into 1930s. She had my sister by then and she had and my father, who was a wonderful human being, but perhaps the least financially responsible person. And my mother was always worried about money.

Gloria Steinem14:32

So somehow it just became too much for her. She had had a uh a miscarriage. She had fallen in love with the man in the newspaper office and she didn't believe in divorce, so she didn't think she could leave. And for a whole bunch of reasons, she had what was then just called a nervous breakdown before I was born, and she was in a sanatorium for a year or two, I'm not sure.

Presenter15:03

For how long? And between the ages of ten and seventeen, you were the you were the sole carer for her. What what are your strongest memories from that time?

Gloria Steinem15:14

Well, I th I think of her and I she was just always so vulnerable and uh sometimes off in another world talking to unseen voices. And, you know, sometimes when she was especially in another world, I would just sit there, you know, holding her hand because she thought there was a war outside and we were in danger and I was afraid she would run out into the street.

Gloria Steinem15:40

Sometimes, you know, she she was okay. But I just never knew what I would find when I went home.

Presenter15:46

You once said, I suspect like many women I'm living the unlived life of my mother.

Gloria Steinem15:54

It took me a while to understand that because I hadn't.

Gloria Steinem15:59

known about my mother's other life, and once I discovered it

Gloria Steinem16:03

And once I was no longer afraid of becoming my mother and understand her from safety, you know, I did begin to realize that I was living out her unlived life in many ways. And I don't say that with any

Presenter16:11

Yeah.

Gloria Steinem16:20

resentment at all because I am living the life I love and I want.

Gloria Steinem16:25

But I do think there are a lot of other people, women especially, but some men too, living out the unlived lives of their parents. And I hope.

Gloria Steinem16:34

Profoundly, that that diminishes. First of all, our parents should be able to live their own lives with their own talents. And secondly, we shouldn't have to.

Gloria Steinem16:43

Feel uh guilty or uh driven you know to to make up for their lives.

Presenter16:51

Gloria Stunnon, let's have some more music then. Tell me, w we're on your fourth of the day.

Gloria Steinem16:55

Ah, well, this is from my college senior year. My mother was in the hospital, I was in college, so I was free. I had gone, in fact, to Geneva on my junior year. And through a girlfriend, utterly fell in love with a man who was nine or ten years my senior. I was just totally knocked out, you know, with this man, this family, everything. And they loved to play games. And they would their favorite game was that they would sing to each other, you know, four bars, eight bars, and you had to guess what it was from.

Presenter17:31

Blue is from

Gloria Steinem17:32

So, this is the only thing that I ever recognized.

Presenter18:42

The Queen of the Night Aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute sung there by Karen Ott with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karion. Gloria Steinem, when did you become a feminist?

Gloria Steinem18:54

I mean, I always understood what I was experiencing was unfair. I just thought I had to get around it secretly somehow, you know.

Gloria Steinem19:03

Um so it wasn't until the late sixties that I went to cover for New York Magazine, which I had helped to found.

Gloria Steinem19:14

Because we had started it ourselves, I was able to have a political column for a change and write about what interested me. And for that column, I went to cover a hearing held in a church basement in downtown Manhattan that was an alternate hearing to one in our New York State legislature.

Gloria Steinem19:36

where they were considering liberalizing the abortion law, and they had invited 14 men and one nun to testify. So you can't make this stuff up. So a group of young women said, no, wait a minute, let's hear from women who've actually had this experience. And they held a hearing. I went to cover it. And for the first time, ever, ever, ever, I heard women standing up in public, taking seriously something that only happened to women, speaking out about it as they were not supposed to do. It was criminal, right?

Gloria Steinem20:14

And demanding change. So it just upturned everything because I had had an abortion here in London.

Gloria Steinem20:21

on my way to India and I would not have been able to not marry th the r the wrong man to whom I was engaged, a very nice man, but we weren't well suited to each other.

Presenter20:34

And so that was the end of the fifties that you were able to get an abortion as you traveled through London. And so as you heard those women stand up and say, This is how it is for me, was it a literal dawning? And

Gloria Steinem20:38

Yeah.

Gloria Steinem20:47

Yes, it was. Because I just suddenly asked why.

Gloria Steinem20:52

You know, I had uh not told anyone about my experience until then, which

Gloria Steinem20:59

I think it's true of many women.

Gloria Steinem21:03

Suddenly I heard these other women thanking doctors who had sometimes helped them and also telling terrible stories of amateur abortions. I mean everything was present in that room, you know, including women who had had to stand up before hospital boards and explain how they got pregnant. I mean it was all there. It was all these experiences were there.

Presenter21:26

You will be aware as much as anybody of course that abortion generates very strong feelings, just the very discussion of it. When you started to write publicly about the subject of abortion,

Presenter21:39

Personally, what sort of response did you get from people?

Gloria Steinem21:42

Relief.

Gloria Steinem21:44

Really? I mean, because so many women and men who love women and care about women have experienced this and it was a forbidden subject.

Presenter21:56

Let's have some more music, Gloria. Tell me what we're going to hear now. We are on to your fifth of the morning.

Gloria Steinem22:01

This is partly because of my favorite voice, Phoebe Snow, just a miraculous voice. And she was a friend. She's no longer with us. And her voice is a miracle, an absolute miracle, and I just want people to share it.

Speaker 422:17

Whoa, oh hocomies of all

Speaker 422:22

You don't have to go.

Speaker 422:26

You're the poetry man.

Gloria Steinem22:26

Draw the ballet.

Speaker 422:28

You make things alright, yeah.

Speaker 422:38

Yeah.

Presenter22:50

Phoebe Snow, poetry man. At Gloria's time, it was nineteen seventy two when you and some fellow feminists decided that you would set up Mes Magazine, which is still going. Um you said of the time those were heady and exciting and naive days. Tell me more about that.

Gloria Steinem23:08

Well, first of all, I kept saying, okay, I'm going to do this for two years, you know, because I imagined that if we could have a successful feminist magazine, that other women's magazines would change. I did not realize that, A, none of our other women's magazines are owned by women. B, they are supported by ads that dictate most of the copy. You know, in order to get ads for cosmetics, you have to have lots of beauty editorial and so on. I didn't realize how powerful the economic structure was. That was

Presenter23:38

That was where the naivety came in. And I immediately wonder then, you know, as you say, women's magazines they survive on

Gloria Steinem23:39

And I am

Presenter23:45

On advertising lipstick, or it could be handbags, or it could be cosmetic surgery, but basically, all those ideals of femininity. And Ms. Magazine is a magazine that didn't and doesn't. So, how the heck?

Gloria Steinem23:53

Then

Gloria Steinem23:56

Yeah.

Presenter23:58

Has it funded itself?

Gloria Steinem23:59

Golf.

Gloria Steinem24:00

The readers wanted. Actually, we did better. I'm not saying that this is a hugely money-making operation, small magazines are not, but it's self-supporting. And we started to do better economically when we stopped taking advertising. We could only get wine and cars and things that didn't demand, because they were used to advertising to men, they didn't demand complimentary copy in the way that fashion and beauty does. And so they set us free, editorially speaking. But it also was very difficult to get because people didn't believe that women chose the car. They thought their fathers or their husbands or their boys, I don't know. So once we no longer had to have an ad staff and just went with no ads, we were better off economically.

Gloria Steinem24:52

And I hope that we consider that when we look at the web, because I'm very worried that the web will be completely dominated by advertisers too. And I do believe that we as consumers will pay for what we want.

Presenter25:07

Time for some more music, Gloria Steinem. We are on your sixth disc of the day. Tell me about this.

Gloria Steinem25:13

Well, Stevie Wonder, Isn't She Lovely?, is a wonderful song in itself because he's singing to his baby daughter. It's also very danceable, and it symbolizes to me all the songs of the 60s and 70s and 80s, and I love to dance, and this is a symbol of many, many, many danceable songs.

Speaker 425:36

If it's still lovely

Speaker 425:40

In the same one.

Speaker 425:43

In the sea pressure

Speaker 425:47

That's that would mean it all

Speaker 425:52

I got a ball!

Speaker 425:56

Making one as lovely as she

Speaker 426:00

Here and shit lovely made up.

Presenter26:08

That was Stevie Wonder, and isn't she lovely. Gloria Steinhelm, you have spoken today a couple of times to this awakening of the idea as a young woman, a woman in her early thirties, that actually you could choose the life that you wanted to live for yourself, that really that's what feminism is.

Speaker 426:25

Uh

Presenter26:25

You don't have children. Was that a decision that you made, or was that just how life ended up being for you?

Gloria Steinem26:33

Well, I think uh I thought everyone had children and was marri I thought you were crazy if you didn't. And it was the advent of of feminism and reading and an understanding that you could live in in different ways that made me realize I was happy. So

Gloria Steinem26:49

Although I occasionally thought that I might adopt a child, every time I imagined it, I imagined that I would come upon an eight or nine or ten or eleven-year-old little girl who needed help and I would adopt her. And finally, even I, who am not very introspective, had to realize that it was about adopting myself, you know, because that's the age at which I was probably in the most trouble. And there are all kinds of ways that we have children in our lives. I mean, my sister had six children, they have children, my friends have children, but I just felt no need. You know, someone once said there's no more reason for everybody with a womb to have a child than for everyone with vocal cords to be an opera singer. It's a gift.

Presenter27:38

Okay.

Gloria Steinem27:38

You

Presenter27:38

You very famously once said, of course, to a journalist who was interviewing you, who said, You look great for forty, and you said, This is what forty looks like. What does eighty one feel like?

Gloria Steinem27:49

Uh quite amazing. I mean, I keep telling I practically stop people in the street to tell them how old I am because I'm trying to make myself realize it. It seems like someone else's age.

Presenter27:59

Okay.

Gloria Steinem28:00

Right. And all the more so, I mean, I'm I'm about to be eighty two, so I'm the age my mother was when she died. And uh by that time she had been in a nursing home for qu

Gloria Steinem28:12

several years, you know. I mean I I forget it, you know, for a while and then somebody reminds me it it does seem odd, but I I am

Gloria Steinem28:22

determined to realize it in a deep sense so that I make good use of my time. I mean, I plan to live to a hundred, mind you, but even so, that's not a very long time.

Presenter28:34

Um, it's time now for your seventh disc, Gloria. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear?

Gloria Steinem28:38

Um

Gloria Steinem28:39

I somehow Vivaldi's four seasons.

Gloria Steinem28:43

I don't know why, but I figure if I'm listening to Vivaldi's four seasons, nothing too bad can happen.

Presenter29:55

That was the Allegro from Winter, part of Vivaldi's four seasons, played by the New York Philharmonic there conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter30:02

Um, Gloria Steinem, you got married in the year two thousand, and that surprised a lot of people. Did it did you surprise yourself with that one?

Gloria Steinem30:10

Absolutely.

Gloria Steinem30:12

Yes, I mean, we loved each other, we wanted to be together.

Gloria Steinem30:16

But we wouldn't have thought about getting legally married at that point, except that.

Gloria Steinem30:22

He had been born in South Africa. He had a British passport. And the kind of visa that he had had been eliminated by Congress, I'm sorry to say. And so I thought about it and I thought, well, you know, we've just spent 30 years trying to make the marriage laws equal. No longer was I going to lose my name, my credit rating, my legal domicile, you know, by getting married.

Gloria Steinem30:44

And I called up my friend Wilma Mankiller, who was the chief of the Cherokee Nation, and I said, What do you think? You know, I'm thinking about getting married. So she said, Well, I'll call you in the morning. So she went out and sat under the stars for an hour or so and decided, Yes, okay. So so we had a Cherokee ceremony.

Presenter31:03

You were married for only three years when your husband was was diagnosed with a brain lymphoma, and you've said that that uh he he taught you about dying. That's a such an interesting phrase. Can you explain a wee bit of that to me?

Gloria Steinem31:19

I think first of all, he taught me to live in the present. He was a intensely living in the present person, and I lived in the future, perhaps left over from trying to escape from my childhood. And also, in some ways, he allowed me to

Gloria Steinem31:37

live the experience with my mother in a good way, because by then I was a grown-up and I could take care of another grown-up, you know. So I never understood when people said about very painful things it was meant to be or I wouldn't change it.

Gloria Steinem31:56

But I kind of feel that way somehow. Yes, I would have changed it, but as it was, I think it was

Gloria Steinem32:04

Important to both of us.

Presenter32:06

Before we listen to your last piece of music, I I want to ask you you're aware that I'm going to cast you away to a desert island today. You'll be all on your own. How are you? Are you a practical person? Can you fish? Could you gut an animal? Could you build a shelter?

Gloria Steinem32:20

Probably, but only out of extreme necessity.

Gloria Steinem32:24

So that's a yes then.

Presenter32:25

Let's hear your final piece of music then, Gloria Steinem. What are we going to listen to now as you're eight?

Gloria Steinem32:31

Well, this is also because of who it is, Jessie Norman. I mean, she was a little girl, an African-American girl in the American South, but she happened to be able to listen to opera on the radio, and so her imagination soared. She's a a miracle of human possibility, and you hear it in her voice.

Speaker 433:24

We love the way.

Presenter33:43

That was Jesse Norman singing When I am Laid in Earth from Purcell's Dido Ananaeus. The music was played by the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Lepard. It's time now for me to give you Gloria the books. We give every castaway the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to take to this island, and they get to take one other book too. What's your other book going to be?

Gloria Steinem34:05

Do I have to take the Bible?

Presenter34:07

No, you certainly don't.

Gloria Steinem34:10

You know, I think that I would take the color purple because it's a great novel and it's about survival, which I would need on a desert island. Alice Walker is a dear friend, so I could imagine she was there with me.

Presenter34:25

We shall give you that, then. Everybody is allowed a luxury, too.

Gloria Steinem34:29

Well, I do think, I mean, unless there's a large supply of coconut oil there, that something you know, either eye drops or moisturizer

Gloria Steinem34:38

Presumably there's water to drink or I wouldn't be alive.

Presenter34:41

I think there's a good chance you find a source of fresh water. I think the eye drops, because I think there might be a coconut or two.

Gloria Steinem34:42

Do you find a source of fresh water?

Gloria Steinem34:46

All right, I'll go for the eye drawer.

Presenter34:47

Okay, they're yours then.

Gloria Steinem34:47

Bye.

Presenter34:49

And if the the waves were to threaten to to wash away the disks, which one would you run to save?

Gloria Steinem34:55

Hmm.

Gloria Steinem34:57

I guess I would choose Jesse Norman's voice because it would be a chance for both music and a friend.

Presenter35:04

It's yours. Gloria Steinem, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Gloria Steinem35:09

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Presenter35:51

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.