Gloria Steinem Brought Women Together to Change the World

In the beginning, there was the famous story about the young journalist Gloria Steinem, going undercover in 1963 as a Playboy Bunny, all décolletage and rabbit ears, in order to expose a culture of degradation and misogyny. The Bunny episode is certainly the Steinem anecdote most often cited, but it’s such an early story that it’s just a canary, really, hinting only a little at what would become a lifelong commitment to feminism. 

Steinem, who died Sept. 2 in her home in New York City at the age of 92, was an icon of second-wave feminism. As one of the co-founders, in 1971, of both Ms. magazine and, along with many other feminists, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Steinem advocated fiercely and vocally on behalf of women’s rights. She was also involved in the fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. 

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But she didn’t consider her life as an “active feminist” to have started until 1969, when in her mid-30s she attended an abortion speak-out in a church basement. Steinem was there as a reporter for New York magazine, but found herself struck by the stories the women told, and the truths that they were willing to reveal in front of other people. She had her own truth, which she came to share.

—Photograph by Susan Wood—Getty Images

Some years ago, she personalized the story further, in the dedication of her 2015 book, My Life on the Road, which reads:

This book is dedicated to:

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.”

Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death:

I’ve done the best I could with my life.

This book is for you.

What is it that makes these words so moving? There was always something real and approachable about Steinem, visible in this dedication as well as in the interviews she gave and the speeches she delivered. You felt you knew her, or you wished you did. You even imagined being her, just a little.

I definitely had feelings along those lines toward Steinem. As a teenager I watched my own mother, a writer who hadn’t been encouraged by her parents to explore her talents fully or go to college, become truly affected by the women’s movement, publishing her first novel in her mid-40s. We subscribed to Ms., and I became part of a consciousness-raising group in school. Though the term "consciousness raising" can feel outdated, I still remember those conversations the other girls and I had. Someone would bring over a container of Lipton’s onion dip and a bag of chips, and we would go around the room speaking about subjects that until then had been kept inside, connected with what we had thought of as privacy, but which in some instances was really shame.

Later on, I was excited to win the Ms. magazine college fiction contest; and still later the writer Mary Gordon invited me to attend Steinem’s 50th birthday party with her. In addition to being overstimulated and thrilled at seeing Steinem, I am pretty sure I also saw Carol Burnett, Sally Ride, and Rosa Parks—if that tells you anything about Steinem’s reach. Beyond that, it was so heady that I can’t tell you much of anything.

“In my old age—really old age, since I’m going to live past 100, I hope,” Steinem once said in an interview with New York magazine, “I would love to have a diner.” She envisioned it as having “blue gingham curtains” and being “by the side of the road,” and she went on to explain: “Diners are the most democratic places. Everyone goes—truck drivers go, people from the neighborhood, people in their tuxes after parties go… And in the back room,” she said, “we could have a little revolutionary meeting from time to time.”

Steinem never actually had a diner, although you could make the case that she did have a sort of symbolic one, because her life’s work involved bringing all kinds of people together to talk, often to touch on matters of radical societal change. She seemed to be everywhere, from the nightly news to a mention on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The warmth and genuineness of her personality, as well as her convictions, breadth of knowledge and experience, and her talents both as a writer and speaker, helped make her a reliable figure over all the decades she spent working for women’s equality. In 2013, Barack Obama presented her with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Gloria Steinem at the offices of Ms. Magazine circa 1974 in New York City. —PL Gould—Getty ImagesGloria Steinem and actress Olympia Dukakis take part in the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League's “March and Rally for Women's Rights” in New York City on Oct. 7, 1995. —LM OteroPresident Barack Obama awards Gloria Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 20, 2013. —Pablo Martinez Monsivais—AP

The expression “the personal is political” easily comes to mind when thinking of Steinem, whose own origin story strongly shaped her inclination toward activism. Born on March 25, 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem lived with her mother Ruth after her parents’ divorce, becoming, at 10, the sole caretaker for her mother, who struggled with mental illness. Among Ruth's many other challenges was keeping a job. Feminism was in Steinem’s DNA (her father’s mother was involved with women’s suffrage and was the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education), but Steinem later realized that witnessing the contempt and disregard that people in power expressed toward her mother—seeing how she was treated as invisible—became a formative social justice experience for her.

She took her percolating consciousness off to Smith College, the all-women’s school in Northampton, Mass., where she studied government. But Smith in the 1950s, while academically rigorous, was also sometimes described by its critics as a place where students went to get their "MRS" degrees. This, Steinem knew, was not something she wanted for herself. As she once told People magazine, “In the 1950s, once you married you became what your husband was, so it seemed like the last choice you’d ever have.” She added, “I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child, my mother. I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else.” (Steinem did eventually marry, but not until her 60s.)

Being responsible for her mother not only molded her convictions about what she didn’t want, but also seems to have allowed her to figure out, earlier than other people, what she did want. And one thing she apparently wanted was experience. Steinem got that, traveling to India on a fellowship; then, later, at Ms., and as a journalist, mentor, and speaker to audiences around the world. Along the way, the glamorous Steinem had a well-documented love life that sometimes involved relationships with powerful men. Her stylishness––the signature aviator glasses and great hair––combined with her intelligence and political engagement, challenged retrograde and insulting ideas about graceless, unappealing feminists. 

Betty Friedan, Elinor Guggenheimer, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Gloria Steinem, at an early meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus in New York, July 19, 1971. —Don Hogan Charles—The New York Times/ReduxAn officer arrests Steinem during an anti-apartheid protest outside the South African Embassy in Washington, Dec. 19, 1984. —APSteinem with her cat in her New York City apartment on March 18, 1970. —AP

It would not be an overstatement to call Steinem the “face” of second-wave feminism, whether it was her preference or not to be known that way. Steinem believed that her personal formation as a feminist had been importantly shaped by Black women. “I thought that they invented the feminist movement,” she said in 2015. “I realize that things being what they are, the white, middle-class part of the movement got reported more.” Throughout her life, both personally and politically, she was sensitive to the needs of various groups whose interests had been sidelined.  

Steinem seemed to capture the feminist imagination in profound ways across decades, often acting as a convener of women. She was known for the “talking circles” frequently held in her home. In 2009, I received an invitation to her house in New York City for a reception to celebrate the filmmaker Jane Campion. Various women in the arts had been invited, and Steinem went around and briefly described everyone’s work, one by one. I suppose “networking” took place that night, but that seems too corporate a term for what I experienced, which was a series of good conversations with women I admired, in the home of someone who mattered to us all. She somehow had time for all of this—more time, even as the clock sped up the way it seems to do as you get older, before it inevitably slows down, then stops.

I had cause to think of Steinem again some years ago when talking to a friend, the novelist J. Courtney Sullivan, who in fact I met for the first time that night at Steinem’s. Sullivan was a core member of the all-volunteer group Immigrant Families Together, which worked to reunite mothers and children who had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2018 she sent out a mass email, looking for housing for immigrant women and their children. She told me she sent 50 emails, and at that point received only one response in which the person volunteered her own home. It was from Steinem, who told Sullivan, in effect: Any of those mothers and their children are welcome to stay in my house for as long as they need.

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