Gloria Steinem

American journalist and feminist

• Born: March 25, 1934
• Place of Birth: Toledo, Ohio

Steinem, a leading feminist writer, editor, and activist, cofounded the highly influential Ms. magazine. Her advocacy for women made her a nationally known figure, and her name has become synonymous with feminism in the United States.

Early Life

Gloria Steinem was born to Ruth Nuneviller Steinem and Leo Steinem on March 25, 1934. Leo was a buyer and seller of antiques who traveled around the country with his family during the winter months. Their summers were spent at Ocean Beach Pier, an entertainment hall that Leo owned and managed at Clark Lake, Michigan. Before Steinem reached her teens, however, her parents separated and then divorced, and her older sister, Sue, went to college, leaving Steinem to take care of her mother, who was mentally ill with anxiety and agoraphobia. The two lived in the rundown little Toledo, Ohio, house in which Steinem’s mother had grown up.

Steinem spent her teenage years in Toledo, trying to balance schoolwork, a social life, dancing lessons, and taking care of her mother, who was kept reasonably calm but also disoriented by tranquilizing drugs. When Steinem was seventeen years old and facing an increasingly dilapidated house with a condemned furnace, the church next door offered to purchase the house. After a great deal of persuasion, her father agreed to care for Ruth for one year so that Steinem could finish high school in Washington, DC, where her sister was living.

The following year, in 1952, Steinem entered Smith College, while Sue cared for their mother. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a major in government in 1956, she broke a college engagement and went to India on a year’s fellowship. Upon her return, unable to get a job as a writer, Steinem spent two years working for the Independent Service for Information, a youth-outreach organization that she later discovered was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Beginning in 1960, she worked in New York as a freelance writer and assistant for Help! magazine.

In 1964, Steinem became a writer for the short-lived comedy television show That Was the Week That Was. She was still frustrated, however, because, although her interests were serious—politics, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and world issues—she was limited because of her gender to writing about light topics such as fashion and celebrities. In 1968, she joined with Clay Felker in founding New York magazine and became one of its writers and editors. She wrote about political issues, publishing articles about serious events in the country and the world.

Life’s Work

Steinem’s feminist consciousness began developing in 1969, when she realized that her concern with society’s disenfranchised groups stemmed from the fact that she too was part of an oppressed group: women. She began to talk with women who had experienced abortions, as she herself had before her trip to India, and she became an advocate for legalized abortion, coining the phrase “reproductive freedom.”

In 1969, Steinem won the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award for her New York article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” one of the first serious journalistic reports on the new feminist movement. She marched in New York City’s Women’s Strike for Equality, a rally held in 1970 to celebrate fifty years of women’s right to vote. Her writing became more and more focused on feminist issues, and she began lecturing with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a black feminist, about the new movement and its importance. She became part of the National Women’s Political Caucus, which had been founded in 1971 to get women involved in politics and government.

In 1971, Steinem and several others, including Hughes and attorney Brenda Feigen, cofounded the Women’s Action Alliance, an organization whose purpose was to develop educational programs geared toward women’s personal and economic equality. Members of the alliance, meeting in Steinem’s apartment, came up with the idea of a feminist-oriented national magazine for women. At first, the group was unable to obtain funding for their venture, but then Clay Felker offered to put out a first issue as a supplement to New York. It was a great success, and with additional articles, it was republished as the preview edition of Ms. magazine in January 1972. In the middle of a publicity trip, Steinem began receiving complaints that the magazine was not available at newsstands. Assuming that it had not been delivered, Steinem called the home office, only to find that the entire run of the first issue—three hundred thousand copies—had sold out in eight days. It was clear that Steinem and her associates were offering something that American women desperately wanted. Ultimately, Warner Communications agreed to finance Ms. while allowing the all-female editorial board complete control of the magazine, making it the first national magazine to be run and controlled entirely by women.

Continuing her concern with politics, Steinem was elected in 1972 to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Representative Shirley Chisholm. The same year, she was chosen as Woman of the Year by McCall’s magazine. Still concerned that women would never be equal until the politics not only of the nation but also of their personal lives were changed, Steinem and some of her Ms. colleagues founded the Ms. Foundation for Women to provide grants to grassroots, self-help projects for women. In 1974, she helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Steinem had become one of the most prominent spokespersons for the women’s movement, and her name became a household word.

In 1974, Ms. launched a television talk show called Woman Alive, which was hosted by Steinem. In 1975, Steinem attended the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City, though not as a delegate. Like many others, she was disappointed that women’s real concerns were largely ignored in favor of nationalistic issues and divisive propaganda. Two years later, as a member of US president Jimmy Carter’s national commission to organize an American Conference on Women to be held in Dallas in 1977, Steinem traveled the country speaking about feminist concerns and organizing state conferences that would elect delegates to the national meeting.

Throughout the 1970s Steinem was active in the effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It had passed Congress in 1972 and had received the ratifications of several states, but in an increasingly conservative time it failed to receive sufficient votes to pass by its original deadline in 1979 or even by an extended deadline in 1982. In 1978, in an effort to publicize the importance of the amendment and to extend the ratification period, Steinem helped organize the extremely successful ERA Extension March in Washington, DC.

In 1978, Steinem moved to Washington to research the effects of feminism on political theory, financed by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution. This fellowship gave her a chance to spend more time with her sister, Sue, as well as her mother, who had finally received hospitalization and treatment and was now living independently.

In 1983, Steinem published her first book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, a collection of essays that included a feminist analysis of her mother’s life, an undercover exposé of the Playboy Club written in 1963, and a fantasy about what life would be like if men could menstruate. Steinem had long encouraged women to commit “outrageous acts,” no matter how small, to change the world, so the title of her book was apt. The next year saw the release of A Bunny’s Tale (1985), a film based on her legendary undercover experience as a waitress at the Playboy Club, starring Kirstie Alley as Steinem.

Ms. magazine, which had ceased publication in 1989, resumed in 1990 as a no-advertising, editorially free feminist publication, and it has since remained popular. In the first issue of the revived magazine, Steinem wrote an essay explaining the effect of advertising on women’s magazines and in particular the effect it had had on previous issues of Ms. magazine, requiring the watering down of its message. Published six times yearly, the magazine includes whatever its editors deem appropriate. Beginning in 1998, Steinem, Marcia Gillespie, and a consortium of feminists operated the magazine under the company name Liberty Media. In 2001 the Feminist Majority Foundation bought Ms. with the enthusiastic support of Steinem, who has since served on the advisory board and as a consulting editor.

The year 1992 saw the publication of another book by Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. In this book, which utilizes some of the tools of the self-help movement that became popular in the 1980s, Steinem probes her own life as well as the stories of others to show the importance of women's self-esteem as they struggle for equality in American society. In the six essays that make up Moving beyond Words: Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles; Breaking the Boundaries of Gender (1993), Steinem examines such issues as the feminization of poverty and the masculinization of wealth, economics as a values system, and the repressive influence of advertisers on the editorial policies of women’s magazines. She also edited The Reader’s Companion to US Women’s History (1998).

Concerned with the problem of child abuse, Steinem coproduced and narrated Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories (1993), an Emmy Award–winning documentary. Also in 1993 she coproduced Better Off Dead, a television movie that considered how it is that some people could oppose abortion yet support the death penalty.

After the presidential election of 2000, Steinem grew increasingly concerned with the simplistic, conflict-obsessed, misleading content of the established media. Accordingly, in 2005 she founded the Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, as well as GreenStone Media along with Fonda, Susan Ness, and Edie Hilliard. The Women's Media Center is concerned with media accuracy and completeness—“unspinning the spin,” in Steinem’s words. GreenStone Media, a radio broadcasting service, offered an alternative to the hostile, combative style of most daytime radio talk shows until it suspended broadcasting in August 2007. Steinem also issued a call for an end to the nation’s electoral college and for the creation of an independent national agency to run elections.

On May 24, 2015, Steinem led a group of women peace activists to cross the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North Korea and South Korea in a call for the formal end of the Korean War, the reunification of families, and for a peace building process headed by women in leadership positions. The same year, she was also the honorary co-chair of the 2015 Women's Walk for Peace in Korea. In 2016, Steinem published the memoir My Life on the Road. On January 21, 2017, she was a speaker and honorary co-chair at the Women's March on Washington. She continued her activism work into the 2020s.

Steinem’s achievements have come despite several personal challenges. In 1993, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and, a year later, trigeminal neuralgia. On September 3, 2000, she married South African–born human rights activist David Bale, only to lose him to brain lymphoma on December 30, 2003. Steinem has continued to write, appear at conferences and in the media, serve on the boards of several organizations, and lecture widely at high schools and universities. Additionally, she has worked with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College to chronicle the origins of the US women’s movement.

Steinem has received dozens of awards and honors. Among them are induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993 and the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 1998, several honorary degrees, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Parenting magazine, and the 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Significance

Steinem has always insisted that she is an ordinary woman who cares about ordinary women. Although a celebrity figure through most of her career, she believes that the most important issues are those of the grassroots. She has been passionate about the personal being political, that changing the world begins by changing lives and the interactions of individuals, and that political power for women means nothing if their daily lives are filled with sexist, gender-based bias and oppression. In 2004, she spoke at an annual conference on women and power about the need for a coevolution of gender roles, saying, “They [men] get stuck in independence. We [women] get stuck in dependence. But all of us are striving for interdependence.”

Steinem’s writings have had the effect of bringing readers to the “click” experience (the “click” is a moment, identified and made famous in Ms. magazine, when the proverbial light comes on in one’s mind and a new insight comes into focus when something is thought about in a whole new way). Some of the phrases that she coined have passed into the popular jargon and are considered part of the folk wisdom of the feminist movement. Two examples are “We have become the men we wanted to marry” and “Most of us are only one man away from welfare.”

Her achievements have also inspired others to create art based on her life. In 2018, a play about her life, Gloria: A Life, opened off-Broadway. A biographical film, called The Glorias, premiered in 2020.

Bibliography

Attebury, Nancy Garhan. Gloria Steinem: Champion of Women’s Rights. Compass Point, 2006.

Burke, Myles. "Gloria Steinem on the Trailblazing Magazine 'For Women in all their Diversity.'" BBC, 15 Mar. 2024, www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240322-gloria-steinem-trailblazing-magazine-for-women. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Cohen, Marcia. The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the Women’s Movement and the Leaders Who Made It Happen. 1988. Sunstone, 2009.

Cooke, Rachel. “Gloria Steinem: ‘I Think We Need to Get Much Angrier.’” The Guardian, 12 Nov. 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/13/gloria-steinem-interview-feminism-abortion. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Davis, Flora. Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America since 1960. Simon, 1991.

Gloria Steinem, www.gloriasteinem.com/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem. Ballantine, 1995.

Henry, Sondra, and Emily Taitz. One Woman’s Power: A Biography of Gloria Steinem. Dillon, 1987.

Hepola, Sarah. “Gloria Steinem, a Woman like No Other.” The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/fashion/in-the-womans-movement-who-will-replace-gloria-steinem.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Kort, Michele. "Gloria Steinem Receives Top National Honor." Ms., 20 Nov. 2013, msmagazine.com/2013/11/20/gloria-steinem-receives-top-national-honor/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Marcello, Patricia Cronin. Gloria Steinem: A Biography. Greenwood, 2004.

"North Korea Supports Gloria Steinem-led Women's Walk Across the DMZ." The Guardian, 3 Apr. 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/03/north-korea-dmz-charity-walk-women-gloria-steinem. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Steinem, Gloria. Doing Sixty and Seventy. Elders Acad., 2006.