MORGAN And they’re not the same. It’s like mistaking a spiral for a circle: you come back at the same thing but at a different level; you see the change from before. The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay — before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating. Or before you said, ‘Henry, pick up your own socks.’ Any of those things. And younger women now just come in at a level that is wonderful to see.

It doesn’t help with the socks, though.

STEINEM Here’s the best answer I ever heard about the socks. Actually it was underwear: “When he leaves his underwear on the floor, I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.” I never forgot that.

Has the messaging changed at all, the way you deliver those ideas?

STEINEM When I first started to go out and speak, I was speaking with a partner, and one of them was Flo Kennedy. I was full of facts and figures, and she said, you know, ‘if you are lying in a ditch, with a truck on your ankle, you do not send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it the [expletive] off.’ So she helped me realize that how we experience reality is not in facts and figures. It’s in simple injustice, and to say it in the way that it’s experienced.

MORGAN Feminism is experiential; it’s comparing notes. And when those stories get told and you realize it’s not just you, it’s bigger, there’s just a huge sigh of relief. Otherwise you think you’re crazy. I thought I was the only woman ever to possibly have faked an orgasm. The first time everybody in my circle said, ‘oh, you too?’, it was literally like [exhales contentedly].

Was Simone de Beauvoir a hopeful person?

MORGAN I think she was, because she wouldn’t have been as political as she was, and after all, she stayed connected to Sartre, and that must’ve taken tremendous, indefatigable hope. [laughter]

STEINEM The only time I met her to talk was, I went to her apartment, with the balcony with books all over, and she was talking about political and class lines as sometimes submerging gender. And my triumph, I felt, was that I made her laugh, by quoting Lee Grant, who said, “I’ve been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one took the garbage out.”