India is a formative setting in the book’s account of women’s bodily knowledge: after college, Gloria Steinem lived there for a couple of years and encountered Hindu images of female genital power that offered a striking counterpoint to the American silence she had known. The yoni, a female genital symbol she saw in temples and shrines, gave visible and sacred form to what her own culture had treated as unmentionable. India becomes the place where self-knowledge and freedom first appeared to her not as abstractions, but as possibilities grounded in a different symbolic world.

A Different Vocabulary for the Body

Steinem recalls growing up in a family that used the hushed euphemism “down there” for female genitalia. The women around her knew accurate anatomical terms, but did not use them; she never heard the word clitoris and did not learn until years later that it was the only organ in the human body with no function other than pleasure. That omission had consequences beyond vocabulary. Without accurate, prideful language for her body, she was left more vulnerable to the schoolyard’s shaming words and dirty jokes, and later to the assumption that male lovers or physicians understood women’s bodies better than women did.

India offered a contrast to that inherited absence. In its Hindu temples and shrines, Steinem saw the lingam, an abstract symbol of male genitalia, alongside the yoni, a female genital symbol. She describes the yoni’s forms as flowerlike, triangular, or like a double-pointed oval. The difference is not simply that a body part is pictured: the symbol places female sexuality within a sacred visual vocabulary, rather than leaving it unnamed or reducing it to shame.

The Yoni and Sacred Power

Steinem was told that the yoni had been worshiped thousands of years earlier as more powerful than its male counterpart, and that this belief continued into Tantrism. She describes Tantrism’s central tenet as the idea that man cannot reach spiritual fulfillment without sexual and emotional union with woman. In this account, female sexuality is not peripheral to spiritual life; it is integral to it. The yoni’s significance thus extends beyond representation of anatomy into a framework that recognizes women’s bodies as sources of power and spiritual meaning.

The book places this symbolism among wider religious traditions in which the divine is not exclusively male. It notes female forms of the sacred in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, and points to Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali as embodiments of the yoni’s powers of birth and death, creation and destruction. The contrast with Steinem’s American experience is sharp: there, even the accurate names for female anatomy were withheld, while in the religious imagery she encountered in India the female body could signify forces at the heart of existence.

Return to American Attitudes

The insight Steinem associates with India did not mean that the cultural conditions she returned to had changed. She describes India and yoni worship as seeming a long way from American attitudes about women’s bodies when she came home. Even the sexual revolution of the 1960s, in her view, did not resolve the underlying imbalance: it made more women sexually available to more men, while the refusal associated with the 1950s gave way to an eager expectation of consent. Greater sexual availability was not the same as women’s bodily knowledge, authority, or freedom.

That distinction clarifies what India contributes to the book’s argument. Its significance lies in the contrast between a symbol that could be worshiped and a body that, in Steinem’s American upbringing, could scarcely be accurately named. The encounter did not by itself undo the silence she describes, but it gave her an early glimpse of another possibility: women’s bodies could be approached through knowledge and reverence rather than euphemism, embarrassment, or male authority.

From Encounter to Public Speech

The book’s later account of women’s interviews develops the question India first sharpened for Steinem: who gets to speak about women’s bodies, and what happens when women are asked directly? She says she spoke with more than two hundred women, including women of different ages and circumstances, and that these conversations became vagina monologues. Many were initially shy, but once they began, they spoke at length; the novelty was that someone had asked them. The shift from silence to testimony turns bodily experience into knowledge voiced by women themselves, rather than hearsay or invention.

One workshop scene makes the problem of knowledge tangible. Participants were asked to examine their bodies with hand mirrors and report what they saw. The speaker recalls that, until then, what she knew about her vagina had been based on hearsay or invention; she had never really looked at it and had not understood it as a part of her own body. Elsewhere, the book recalls a girl who was twelve when her mother slapped her at the onset of menstruation, and describes fear of being smelled and treated with antiseptic at camp. These episodes show how silence and shame are learned through ordinary family and social encounters. Against them, the sacred visibility Steinem first witnessed in India remains a suggestive counter-image, not a claim that all women’s experience is the same.

The movement from that early encounter to public speech also changes the status of naming. The book describes women reclaiming the word “cunt” and records a participant who says she is now proud to say vagina, using the word at least five times a day. After performances, women approach the speaker to tell their own stories and offer responses. India’s place in this account is therefore a beginning rather than a solution: it supplied an image of female bodily power that could help expose the limits of American silence, while later acts of looking, naming, and listening made that challenge collective and audible.