The January evening I saw Paramount Theatre events newsletter that advertised discussion between Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem, I stopped scrolling. A voice in my head spoke. Don’t miss this. The last time I had been in Austin’s most revered performance venue at the end of 2019 to see the one-man comedy revue, A John Waters’ Christmas. I needed the laughs; God knows we all did. Global upheavals, a splintering democracy and the specter of climate change had made it a difficult three years for everyone. What none of us knew was that it would be the last time most would chance going into a closed public space with large, freely-breathing crowds for the next two years.

An ice storm named Landon—of the kind Texans had never seen until Uri nearly shut down the state’s power grid in 2021—pushed a February show to April. That made me impatient. I’d long been a reader of Atwood’s poetry and frighteningly prescient fiction. And Steinem, one of the original founders of Ms. magazine, had been among the many dynamic feminist activist-intellectuals I had followed since college. Steinem had identified as feminist from the beginning. Atwood did not. It would take the better part of an almost sixty-year career to realize that writing meaningful novels about women was anything but an apolitical act.  

I won’t lie. Going into a small downtown venue that had been sold out for weeks gave me a raging case of the willies. Especially when I saw how few people were wearing masks. But infection numbers were lower than they’d been since the COVID outbreak; we were clearly in some kind of remission, and the excitement of being out and about was visible in the animated chattiness of everyone—women and men, young and old—standing in line to get into the show. And it was a fine, mild spring to boot, better than any we’d had in years.

I sat perched in the mezzanine, the energy sizzling and popping around me. Voices buzzed, bodies buzzed. It was as though I had stumbled into a revival meeting for liberals, minus the tents and laying-on of healing hands. Not that I minded. People were filled with a joyful exuberance I’d not seen in a long time, their anticipation stoked like fire by each of the speakers who introduced the show. And never let us forget that the spectacle about to take place was more than just a parley between two octogenarian village elders but a historic moment.

The crowd roared appreciation when Atwood and Steinem took the stage. They moved slowly, these age-bent sisters, their hands interlaced before them. The trademark silver concho belt around Steinem’s slight waist nodded to the trademark stylishness that had made her a feminist fashion icon, as did the elegant red scarf around her neck. But it was Atwood I loved. Gray curls flying, she seemed less a prophetess of doom and more a crazy great-aunt who’d pulled on red and white socks to recall the colors of the Canadian flag but forgotten they were mismatched.

Almost all topics discussed were grounded in Texas politics—a clear message, it seemed, that the state had evolved into a bellwether for American democracy. Leading off with the state’s controversial abortion bill-turned-law, the pair took aim and fired. The decision wasn’t just about limiting a woman’s right to choose. It was also a warning shot across the bow of democracy. Both drew historical parallels between that decision—which has since become a model for other conservative state legislatures seeking similar restrictions—and decisions made by three twentieth century dictators: Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. The day after Hitler was elected, his first act was to close down all abortion centers and declare abortion itself a crime against the state; Mussolini would follow suit. And when Ceaușescu came to power in the mid-60s, he not only mandated that women have more children, but that they take pregnancy tests every month.

It was about the body, specifically, the female body. It always is. I knew this from my own work on this topic as a literary historian of colonial empires. Democracy and the lack of it reveals itself in what laws say a woman can do with her body. Especially when it comes to reproduction. Steinem knew this from first-hand experience as a young woman coming of age during the McCarthy era, when she took her future—and life— into her own hand by seeking a then-outlawed abortion. Atwood, whose chilling bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale, did too, basing much of the novel on her study of Ceaușescu’s draconian policies.

With what’s happened here in Texas, and now Idaho and places throughout the south, challenges to Roe v. Wade are imminent. Atwood and Steinem await this next phase with horror and hope. With the Supreme Court’s current—and unbalanced—composition of three liberals, five hard righters, and one conservative moderate, the outcome seems a foregone conclusion. Unless there is a counter-movement that perhaps revives the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), that needs only congressional ratification to become law. As it stands, the United States is the only one of the twenty-six democratic nations in the world that has not yet included women in its constitution.

That wasn’t all these women had to say. They talked about the Texas school library book ban that, since the beginning of February, has forced school districts across the state to pull 850 titles that, like Atwood’s novel, deal with race, gender and/or sexuality issues. I knew about this, of course. But hearing it spoken aloud in a packed theater with every ear attuned listening in rapt attention made it seem too real. So did statistics from the American Library Association that revealed how 2021 had been the worst year yet for challenges to the freedom to read. And ultimately, express oneself.

In restricting access to books, it mirrors actions it took regarding who can vote.  In September 2021, the legislature passed a law that targets mail-in ballots. A law that, as the results from the most recent Texas primary have shown, disproportionately affects people of color, especially those who live in rural areas. Neither speaker seemed surprised. “It’s the exacerbation of an existing tendency,” Atwood said. A tendency she meant but did not say included the racism and income inequality that are destroying the country just as surely as the COVID pandemic.

Despite the gravity of these topics and their concern that the chaos in American politics and society would blind the US to external and internal threats to its existence, both still expressed guarded optimism. “Hope is a form of planning,” Steinem said. A necessary life-affirming vision of what could be. Nodding her grizzled head, Atwood concurred. From the humanist perspective I understood so well, she expressed belief that hope is something all people have from the very beginning. A kind of in-built programming to protect us against ourselves. Against the destructive impulses that continue to devastate the Ukraine, create worldwide chaos, and threaten both our species and the fragile blue marble of a world it continues to abuse.

No one, including myself, wanted to see them leave the stage. But as they stood up to receive the standing ovation they deserved, they used each other as braces. Even from where I sat, I could see they were tired. Pulling each other up by the shoulders, they pushed the sides of their smiling faces together and squeezed. Strong as truth, they were still two frail old women who needed each other’s strength to speak. And say the words that too many people outside the walls of a small Austin theater refuse to hear.