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| Gloria Steinem | |
|---|---|
| Steinem in 1977 | |
| Born | Gloria Marie Steinem[1] March 25, 1934 Toledo, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | September 2, 2026 (aged 92) New York City, U.S. |
| Education | Smith College (BA) |
| Occupations | CIA agent, writer and journalist for Ms. and New York magazines[2] |
| Movement | Feminism[2] |
| Board member of | Women’s Media Center[3] |
| Spouse | David Bale(m. 2000; died 2003) |
| Relatives | Christian Bale (stepson) |
| Website | www.gloriasteinem.com |
| Signature | |
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Gloria Marie Steinem (/ˈstaɪnəm/ STY-nəm; March 25, 1934 – September 2, 2026) was an American journalist and social movement activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who remained particularly prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s.[1][4][2][5]
Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and co-founder of Ms. magazine.[2] In 1969, she published “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”,[6] an article that brought her national attention and positioned her as a feminist leader.[7] In 1971, she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which provided training and support for women seeking elected and appointed office. Also in 1971, she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, which until 1997 supported a network of feminist activists and worked to advance feminist causes and legislation. In the 1990s, Steinem helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day, an occasion for young girls to learn about future career opportunities.[8] In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that “works to make women visible and powerful in the media”.[9]
She traveled internationally as an organizer and lecturer and was a media spokeswoman on issues of equality.[10] In 2015, Steinem, alongside two Nobel Peace laureates (Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia[11]) and other prominent women peace activists, undertook a journey from the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, to South Korea, crossing the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the heavily militarized border on the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula.
Early life and education
Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio on March 25, 1934,[4] to Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Her mother was Presbyterian, mostly of German (including Prussian) and some Scottish descent.[12][13] Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg, Germany, and Radziejów, Poland.[13][14][15] Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and was the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. She was also a leader in the movement for vocational education[16] and rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust.[16]
The Steinems lived and traveled in a trailer, from which Leo carried out his trade as a roaming antiques dealer.[16] Before Gloria was born, her mother, Ruth, then age 34, had according to Steinem “a ‘nervous breakdown’, as [Ruth] and everyone else called it” that left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that sometimes turned violent.[17] Steinem said that Ruth changed “from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving” woman into “someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book”.[17] Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill.[17] Steinem was ten years old when her parents separated in 1944.[17] Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.[18][17]
Although her parents divorced under the strain of her mother’s illness, Steinem did not attribute it to male chauvinism. She said she “understood and never blamed him for the breakup”.[19] The impact of these events shaped her personality. Her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided financial stability, and his departure aggravated their situation.[20] Steinem concluded that her mother’s inability to hold a job reflected broader hostility toward working women.[20] She also believed that doctors’ apathy toward her mother stemmed from similar anti-woman animus.[20] Years later, Steinem described her mother’s experience as pivotal to her understanding of social injustices.[21]: 129–138 These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.[21]
Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., graduating from the latter while living with her older sister Susanne Steinem Patch.[22][23] She then attended Smith College,[24] an institution from which she received her A.B. magna cum laude and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.[10]
In 1957, Steinem had an abortion. The procedure was performed by Dr. John Sharpe, a British physician, when abortion was still illegal.[25] Years later, Steinem dedicated her memoir My Life on the Road (2015)[26] to him. She wrote, “Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, ‘You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.'”[27]
In the late 1950s, Steinem spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow.[28] She was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and later modeled her campaign work after Gandhi’s independence movement.[29][30] After returning to the United States, she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by the CIA.[31] She worked to send non-communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival.[31] In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine.[32]
Journalism
Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Steinem what she later called her first “serious assignment”, regarding contraception; he didn’t like her first draft and had her re-write the article.[33] Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan‘s book The Feminine Mystique by one year.[33][34]
In 1963, while working on an article for Huntington Hartford‘s Show magazine, Steinem was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club.[35] The article, published in 1963 as “A Bunny’s Tale”, featured a photo of Steinem in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs.[36] Steinem maintained that she was proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the Bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law.[37][38] For a brief period after the article was published, Steinem was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was “because [she] had now become a Bunny—and it didn’t matter why”.[37][39] However, after the article was published, the owner of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, wrote a letter stating he would remove requirements for Bunnies to get gynecological exams and STD testing.[40][41]
In the interim, Steinem conducted an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1964.[42] In 1965, she wrote for NBC-TV’s weekly satirical revue, That Was The Week That Was (TW3), contributing a regular segment entitled “Surrealism in Everyday Life”.[43] Steinem eventually landed a job at Felker’s newly founded New York magazine in 1968.[33]
In 1969, Steinem covered for New York Magazine an abortion speak-out which was held in a church basement in Greenwich Village, New York.[44][45] Steinem had had an abortion herself in London at the age of 22.[46] She felt what she called a “big click” at the speak-out, and later said she didn’t “begin my life as an active feminist” until that day.[45] As she recalled, “It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn’t tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn’t [positive].”[46] She also said, “In later years, if I’m remembered at all it will be for inventing a phrase like ‘reproductive freedom’ … as a phrase it includes the freedom to have children or not to. So it makes it possible for us to make a coalition.”[47]
In 1972, Steinem co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. alongside founding editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mary Peacock; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felker funded the first issue.[33] Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days.[48][49] Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters.[49] In 1974, Ms. collaborated with public television to produce the television program Woman Alive!, and Steinem was featured in the first episode in her role as co-founder of Ms. magazine.[50] The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and served on the advisory board.[49]
Also in 1972, Steinem became the first woman to speak at the National Press Club.[51]
Steinem spoke at the 1977 National Women’s Conference among other speakers, including Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Bella Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Cecilia Burciaga, Lenore Hershey, and Jean O’Leary.[52]
In 1978, Steinem wrote a semi-satirical essay for Cosmopolitan titled “If Men Could Menstruate” in which she imagined a world where men menstruate instead of women. She concludes in the essay that in such a world, menstruation would become a badge of honor with men comparing their relative sufferings, rather than the source of shame that it had been for women.[53]
On March 22, 1998, Steinem published an op-ed in The New York Times (“Feminists and the Clinton Question”) in which she claimed that Bill Clinton‘s alleged behavior did not constitute sexual harassment, although she did not actually challenge the accounts by his accusers.[54] The op-ed was criticized by various writers, as in the Harvard Crimson[55] and in the Times itself.[56] In 2017, Steinem, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, stood by her 1998 New York Times op-ed, but also said: “I wouldn’t write the same thing now.”[57]
Activism
Early activism (1968–1976)
In 1968, Steinem signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[58] The following year, her article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”[59] brought her to national fame as a feminist leader.[7] As such she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in its favor in 1970.[60][61] That same year she published her essay on a utopia of gender equality, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win”, in Time magazine.[62]
On July 10, 1971, Steinem was one of more than three hundred women who founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), including such notables as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Myrlie Evers-Williams.[63] As a co-convener of the Caucus, she delivered the speech “Address to the Women of America“, stating in part:
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.[64]
In 1972, she ran as a delegate for Shirley Chisholm in New York, but lost.[65] In March of the following year, she addressed the first national conference of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, which she continued to support throughout its existence.[66] Stewardesses for Women’s Rights folded in the spring of 1976.[66]
Steinem, who grew up reading Wonder Woman comics, was also a key player in the restoration of Wonder Woman’s powers and traditional costume, which were restored in issue #204 (January–February 1973).[67] Steinem, offended that the most famous female superhero had been depowered, had placed Wonder Woman (in costume) on the cover of the first issue of Ms. (1972)—Warner Communications, DC Comics’ owner, was an investor—which also contained an appreciative essay about the character.[67][68] In doing so, however, Steinem forced the firing of Samuel R. Delany who had taken over scripting duties with issue #202. Delany was supposed to write a six-issue story arc, which would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic where Wonder Woman was to defend women trying to use their services. The story outlines and the work already done on the issues were scrapped, something that Steinem was not aware of and made no attempt to rectify.[69]
In 1976, the first women-only Passover seder was held in Esther M. Broner’s New York City apartment and led by Broner, with 13 women attending, including Steinem.[70]