mis archetype. Steinem has become a larger-than-life, mythic person-
ality to people who project the goddess image onto her. There in the
public eye is Gloria Steinem, a leader of the women’s movement,
and there in the mind’s eye is a tall, graceful Artemis, standing in
the midst of her companions.
Women who align themselves with the aims and aspirations of
the women’s movement often admire and identify with Gloria
Steinem as a personification of Artemis. This identification was es-
pecially true in the early 1970s, when a great many women wore
her trademark aviator glasses and imitated her long, free-flowing
hair style, parted in the center. Ten years later, surface emulation
has been replaced by efforts to be, like her, attractive women with
personal power and independence.
The Artemis mystique surrounding Steinem’s role and appearance
is enhanced by her single status. Although she has been linked ro-
mantically with several men, she has not married—fittingly for a
woman who represents a “one-in-herself” virgin goddess, who
“belongs to no man.”
Steinem is in the tradition of Artemis in that women appeal to her
for help, which, big-sister-like, she provides. I felt her support
firsthand, when I asked her to come to the American Psychiatric
Association annual meetings to help those of us who were trying to
get the APA to back the women’s movement boycott of states that
had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). I was fascinated
to see how much power was attributed to Gloria Steinem by many
men who “had offended her” and who then reacted as if they might
share Actaeon’s fate. Some male psychiatrists who opposed her ac-
tually expressed (unfounded) fears that they could be financially
ruined or could even lose research grant money if this “goddess”
were to exercise her power to punish and destroy them.
BACK-TO-NATURE ARTEMIS
In her affinity for the wilderness and undomesticated nature,
Artemis is the archetype responsible for the at-oneness with them-
selves and with nature felt by some women when they backpack
into forested mountains, fall asleep under the
Artemis: Goddess of the Hunt and Moon, Competitor and Sister