An Imperfect Image : When Gloria Steinem admits to being insecure about her looks and choosing the wrong guy, the critics pounce. Some are even saying feminism is dead.

NEW YORK —  So, it is possible to gossip about Gloria Steinem even more than before.

If people prattled on about her when she was merely the smart provocateur of equality between women and men, they are at it again after her confession that her inner and outer lives have not been symmetrical all these years.

In fact, like a lot of women, Steinem once fell for the wrong guy. She was insecure. She didn’t feel pretty, though she was “the pretty one” in the feminist movement. She had a traumatic childhood that left a destructive imprint.

And, of all things, she is not and never has been perfect.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who heard her lecture in a college auditorium or maybe caught her on “Donahue” or read her work in Ms. magazine.

“Every time I lectured or spoke, I revealed my life wasn’t all perfect,” she says. “I talked about myself at the beginning of every lecture because that’s what consciousness-raising is: It’s truth about our lives.”

Maybe some people didn’t understand her.

When feminists declared “the personal is political,” they expected Steinem--who looked as if she had her single-woman life in order--to be politically perfect. Now, her latest admissions of human frailty, made in her new book called “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem,” have been greeted with a nasty glee that begs the question:

So what if Gloria Steinem the person wasn’t as perfect as Gloria Steinem the media dazzler? Why are some who have benefited from her tireless public commitment lapping up her private-image problems in a frenzy that seems almost anthropological, the way some cultures killed their kings when they got old or vulnerable?

One British female interviewer trotted into her Manhattan apartment and declared bluntly: “I don’t like you; you make me feel bad about myself.”

Another columnist wrote of Steinem: “I read this book by the woman who now truly has everything: fame, fortune, and peace of mind, and in the process of the introduction to her self-esteem, my own dripped slowly away.”

And Washington author Sally Quinn recently characterized Steinem and others who spoke for the movement as “hypocritical,” suggesting also that “feminism is dead.” In a newspaper opinion column Quinn wrote, “Not surprisingly, when Steinem used to say, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ the women who believed her felt ashamed and guilty.”

That business about the fish and bicycle, Steinem retorts, was a throwaway line coined by someone else.

“I never, ever, ever said it wasn’t important to have men in our lives,” she insists, sounding annoyed. “In fact, in my first decade of lecturing, I always said, far from dividing women and men, feminism will make love possible for the first time. That economic dependency may look like love, but it feels very different.”

Still, Steinem seems perplexed by the spiteful undertone of these reactions. While in Cleveland the other day facing about the 50th interview for the new book, she called back to New York to report that despite feeling “happier, stronger, better, more likely to be out on the ramparts than ever before, people perceive me as feeling weak because I talk about pain in my life.”

Suddenly, she has new empathy for former Democratic vice presidential candidate Edmund Muskie, once blasted by the media for publicly crying.

“It’s amazing to me that he was regarded as being less strong for being able to express sadness,” Steinem says.

Similarly, among Quinn’s evidence to support her theory that feminism is dead is Steinem’s admission in her book that she fell in love with someone who, Quinn says, “treated her badly. (Steinem) had seduced him, she says, by playing down the person she was and playing up the person he wanted her to be. . . .”

Steinem can’t imagine how Quinn got the idea she was treated badly.

“If she read the book, she’d see I was treated wonderfully,” she says of her two-year relationship with a man who, though not named in the book, East Coast gossip columns suggest is real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman.

But Steinem disagrees that the so-called death of feminism is evidenced by misfires in her and other feminist leaders’ personal lives. After all, her celebrity, at bottom, has more to do with the way women live than with some dolled-up fantasy image on a TV screen.

“It’s impossible to be a role model if you don’t admit your mistakes,” she says. “All you do is convince other people that they can’t do it. And that’s another thing that people don’t get: Everything is not solved in one generation.”

Author Susan Faludi, who, in her early 30s, is a generation younger than the feminist leader, understood her message as well as why some others didn’t.

“Gloria Steinem has always been this voice of reason and wit,” says Faludi, author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.” “One reason there’s such eagerness to attack her is that she in fact belies tiresome stereotypes. . . . She’s attractive, has a personal life. She’s funny, which makes her a constant irritation to those who would dismiss feminism as a gathering of sour-faced, bonneted suffragettes.”

And by the way, Faludi adds, the message she picked up from Steinem is “we live in an unequal society where women are denied basic rights for reproductive choice, equal pay, equal access to institutions of higher learning and political power.

“Her version of feminism was that a woman shouldn’t be judged by whether she marries or falls for Mort Zuckerman,” Faludi says. “If you look at Steinem’s political focus for the last 20 years, she hasn’t been going around the country passing herself off as a marriage counselor.”

Gloria Steinem, almost 58, is in her fabulously redecorated Manhattan apartment talking about a sorrowfully impoverished childhood.

For this interview, she sits in a overstuffed chair, her bare feet tucked under her; her trademark streaked hair, no longer a veil over the edges of aviator glasses, is shorter and pulled back. She is still thin and trendy in a crushed-velvet blouse and leggings, but a whole-grain diet and exercise seem to have added sturdiness to a wiry frame.

From the age of 10, after her parents’ divorce, Steinem was left to care for her mentally ill mother in a tumbledown house in Toledo, Ohio.

That experience, she explains, led her as an adult to mother a movement--and ultimately ignore her own emotional needs. In relearning those needs, Steinem believes she can be more effective. But nowhere in the book does she say establishing self-worth should take precedence over social accent. At heart, this book is about their codependence.

“If someone had given me this book before I wrote it, I don’t think I would have understood it,” she says. “I probably would have gotten the political part first--structures outside us undermine our self-authority in order to get us to obey their authority. But whether I would have been ready to go back to my own past. . . . I think you need to feel ready.”

And was she ever ready.

When she sat down to write four years ago, she was recovering from a brush with breast cancer. Ms., which she had co-founded and nurtured, had been sold. The mismatch with Zuckerman had fallen apart. The writer in Steinem was frustrated that she had not produced anything longer than magazine articles, which were collected in an earlier book. And she hadn’t saved a cent.

With a $700,000 advance and a longing to write about self-esteem (“We write what we need”), Steinem spent several months putting together a 250-page manuscript. But it wasn’t until a friend read the first draft that she began to explore what would become the true spine of the book.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” said the friend, a therapist, “but I think you have a self-esteem problem. You forgot to put yourself in.”

Steinem was devastated. But over the next three years she stayed put and wrote and rewrote, instead of traveling five days a week for the cause. She also sought psychological counseling, but it all didn’t come together easily.

“In every chapter I recapitulated the process of writing the book,” she says. “I would write a chapter, leave myself out and then start again.”

“I finally began to admit,” she writes, “that I, too, was more aware of other people’s feelings than my own; that I had been repeating the patterns of my childhood without recognizing them . . . that my image of myself was very distant from other people’s image of me; that, in short, my childhood years--a part of my life I thought I had walled off--were still shaping the present as surely as a concealed magnet shapes metal dust.”

Steinem wove her own experiences with inspirational tales of others, from a lesbian activist to Mohandas K. Gandhi. The result is a compilation of philosophy, politics, history, several relentlessly cheery self-help homilies and stories from Steinem’s 20 years of witnessing revolution.

They were equally exhilarating and draining years. While she was traversing America--lecturing in every town that would hear her--she was also organizing for women’s every need, from day care to shelter for the abused. Back home, there was almost always a steady boyfriend, a corps of friends and Ms. magazine, with a staff that was like family and finances that were a major burden.

Steinem also kept busy in her role as a celebrity. She had first been noticed in her pre-feminist life as a New York reporter; a canny piece about her experience as an undercover Playboy bunny earned her the label of “the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton,” and that patina endured when she became a feminist icon.

These days, however, feminism is not the route to celebrityhood it once was--better you should check into the Betty Ford Center. Declarations on the death of feminism are popular among some younger women who fear it would associate them with bra-burners. (For the record, Steinem says she neither burned a bra nor saw one even lightly singed.)

“You know, the women’s movement has been declared dead every Wednesday at teatime,” Steinem says, laughing. But she’s not smiling when she gives an example of why women’s issues are more important than ever: “Abortion is going to be the big, explosive issue of the 1992 presidential campaign if the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade.”

She adds, “Look at the public opinion polls. There has never been more support of every issue of equality than there is now.” And basic to equality is self-worth.

Some may suspect Steinem is reconfiguring herself for an era in which bookstores devote whole sections to self-help and celebrities talk publicly about their childhood experiences with incest. But as Faludi notes: “Why not read an intelligent self-help book by a feminist? If she can tap into that huge industry and give people a few feminist tidbits to chew on along the way, so much the better.”

In the past, living for her work may have allowed Steinem to live in her public image. Now, perhaps, her much-improved self-image may help her work and therefore others.

“I would have been much better off if I had made these changes long ago,” she says with regret. “I would have been better able to deal with conflict. I would have been less likely to confuse motion with action. Instead of saying yes to three things and doing them adequately, I would have said yes to one and written a really good speech with impact.”

Those lessons learned, she says, she will continue to write and agitate. Her next book will be on “the masculinization of wealth,” a treatise on women and money. She will also write for Ms., now revived and healthy, and work for the Ms. Foundation, whose projects for women she describes with the enthusiasm of a new recruit.

There’s all that to anticipate and--aging.

A postcard stuck in her bedroom mirror shows a white-haired Chinese woman, a mass of smiling wrinkles and ruddy cheeks. The woman was belting out an opera to the sky when a photographer came upon her in a Beijing park. For a moment, she stopped to smile at the camera, then went on singing.

“Now, she smiles at me every morning from my mantel,” Steinem writes in her book. “I love this woman. I like to think that, walking on the path ahead of me, she looks a lot like my future self.”