Author and domestic violence survivor, Leslie Morgan Steiner
By Samantha Parent Walravens
At 22, Leslie Morgan Steiner had it all. A degree from Harvard, her dream job at Seventeen magazine, and a handsome boyfriend who adored her. Then, five days before their wedding, her fiancé violently attacked her.
As she describes in her 2013 TedTalk, “Why domestic violence victims don't leave,” “He put both of his hands around my neck and squeezed so tightly that I could not breathe or scream, and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall.”
Five days later, she put on her mother’s wedding dress and married him.
“[He told me] he was very, very sorry, that it was an isolated incident and he was never going to hurt me again,” she continues.
He beat her twice more on their honeymoon.
Morgan Steiner has used her platform as a best-selling author, speaker, and women’s advocate to educate millions of people on the misconceptions we hold about victims of domestic violence and how we can all help break the silence.
Coming off of October’s National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we catch up with Morgan Steiner on her journey to healing and self-love and where we are on the path to women’s equality.
SW: Your life has been an open book, literally speaking. In your four books, you discuss important issues that affect many women but that most women are afraid to talk about– domestic abuse, eating disorders, sex and sexuality. Why have you chosen to share in this way?
LMS: I have found that the best way to connect with other women is to be really vulnerable, to be really open. It’s what I learned in Mommy Wars. It wasn't doing any of us women any good to be like, “My job is so great.” “I love my husband.” “My boss is so understanding.” “I'm so lucky to be a mom.” That kind of tripe wasn’t helping women because it made everybody feel terrible.
What was really great was when a woman would take a deep breath and say, "I love my nanny more than my husband.” “I hate my boss.” “Sometimes I want to rip out my uterus because I regret having kids so much." That kind of honesty brought us together in a way that was real and actually profoundly rebellious against societal norms.
SW: What are the “societal norms” you are referring to?
LMS: Society says to women from a very young age that the two most important things in life are 1) pleasing men and 2) being superior to other women– being prettier, thinner, sexier, younger. We’ve been fed these societal rules since we were 2 years old–beginning with the “princess mythology” and who you’re going to marry when you grow up. These messages come from our own mothers, our teachers, and some of the best women in our lives.
Women need to say to hell with that. And in order to do so, there are some things you must do. First and foremost, you have to invest in your education and your ability to support yourself economically, because if you don't have that kind of economic freedom, you can't say to hell with all that.
SW: You say that domestic abuse “hides in plain sight.” What does that mean?
LMS: Unhealthy relationships are everywhere, and they hide in plain sight. It’s important to be very well educated about the warning signs and to be aware of it so that you could see it in yourself and your own relationships, and in your friends and family members. The most important thing to understand is that domestic abuse happens everywhere — in every economic level, every educational level, every neighborhood, every school, every church group. It has nothing to do with education or privilege or lack of privilege.
SW: What are the warning signs of domestic abuse, and how do we know if it’s happening with our family or friends?
LMS: With all of us who have been in abusive relationships, it started out with us feeling sorry for our abuser. We wanted to help them and love them and show them what love was really about. Anybody in your life who tries to make you feel sorry for them is manipulating you and setting you up for an abusive relationship because pity is a really huge part of abuse.
Other warning signs are when someone makes you feel like you're walking on eggshells, that you have to earn their love by being perfect or being constantly available and never being able to put yourself first. Those are red flags.
SW: Are the “Mommy Wars” you wrote about in 2007 - the standoff and soul-crushing judgment between stay-at-home and working mothers — still happening?
LMS: Four million babies are born in the United States every year, so that means a lot of new moms are being brought into the motherhood franchise each year. The young moms that I speak to are just as obsessed with being the “perfect mother” and figuring out the absolute best way to be pregnant and to give birth and to raise a child. There is tremendous pressure in new motherhood, and we receive almost no training for it.
There's not so much a division between working and stay-at-home moms as there once was. I think moms are getting more quickly to the realization that we need other moms to get through this and that we need to support other moms..
SW: In a recent Washington Post article, you wrote about wearing your bikini at age 56. You struggled with an eating disorder when you were younger. How do we build self-esteem and body positivity in our daughters?
LMS: I loved writing that piece for The Post. It was really fun to talk to other women about their bodies. Aging is a really interesting process, and we're in good company because we're all doing it.
I think that adolescence is the hardest time in a woman's life. I look at pictures of myself at 18, and think God, I looked great! But did I feel great then? No. Today, with the incessant imagery of social media and the ubiquitousness of online porn, adolescent girls have incredibly unrealistic expectations about what they should look like and what they need to do to sexually please the boys and men in their lives. It is a huge challenge for girls.
As a mother, I made sure to never say a self-hating thing in front of my two daughters, like I'm so fat or my ass is too big, or look at these wrinkles, or I look hideous in that picture. My ex-husband and I tried really hard to make sure we were shoveling positive self-esteem into our daughters and our son as much as possible, because that's the most difficult and expensive thing to backfill later in life.
SW: Have you achieved self-love after 50?
LMS: Something happens to women around age 50. It’s like we’ve been taking a “good girl” pill our entire life that says we have to please men and please our families and be a good girl and a good wife and a good worker and a good partner. And that pill stops at 50. Almost every woman I know feels this way. She’s more like, “I don't care what they think."
When I was turning 49, it was one of the best years of my entire life because I had finally left the man who was intent on making me feel terrible about myself all the time. Three days before my 50th birthday, I slept with a 29-year-old man who was as handsome as Brad Pitt, and I knew I was at the beginning of an incredible adventure.
SW: With women’s reproductive rights in jeopardy, what should voters be thinking about in this election cycle?
LMS: If you think about it, women have no freedom of any type– economic, career, education– if we cannot control when we have children. And that means that we have to be able to have access to birth control and we have to have access to abortion. I started having sex when I was a teenager, which is when most girls do. If I hadn't had access to birth control, I would have had 10 children, and I wouldn't have had a career, reproductive freedom, independence. You can talk to any woman who was alive and sexually active before 1973 and it's just so clear. We can never give up on this fight.
