Monday, March 31, 2025

Lupu Remembers Steinem at the HLR Banquet

Ira C. Lupu, George Washington University Law School, has posted Gloria Steinem at the Harvard Law Review Banquet, which appeared in the Green Bag:

In the Spring of 1971, Gloria Steinem became the first woman to be the keynote speaker at the prestigious annual banquet of the Harvard Law Review. At that time, as an editor of the Review, I played an instigating part in the process that led to this controversial invitation. I attended the Banquet, and I paid close attention to the speech and its aftermath. In 1998, I decided to memorialize that experience in this essay, which frames the event in its cultural and political context – the rise of feminism, the Vietnam War, and American student radicalism, among other phenomena. In her book My Life on the Road (2015), Ms. Steinem draws explicitly from details in the essay in describing her experience at the Banquet.
--Dan Ernst