CREDIT: Associated Press
GLORIA STEINEM became an active feminist in 1969, when the New York State legislature, considering a revision of its antiabortion law, convened a panel of “experts” that was made up of fourteen men and a nun. In protest, a feminist group called Redstockings held a counterhearing that was covered by Steinem, then a thirty-five-year-old journalist. She heard women talk openly about their experiences with abortions. One woman described the humiliation of being interrogated at a hospital by a committee of men, who asked her the details of how she got pregnant and then told her that they would give her an abortion only if she agreed to be sterilized.
“There was something about seeing women tell the truth about their lives in public, and seeing women take seriously something that only happens to women,” Steinem recalled in an interview with New York magazine in April 1998. “In my experience, things were only taken seriously if they also happened to men. It made some sense of my own experience—I had had an abortion and had never told anyone. It was one of those moments when you ask, ‘Why?’”
Since then, Steinem has been asking “Why?”—and encouraging others to do the same—about a wide range of issues, mostly dealing with women’s roles in society, helping popularize feminist ideas as a writer and activist. Her frequent articles and appearances on TV and at rallies have made her feminism’s most prominent public figure.
Steinem had a peripatetic childhood. Her father, Leo Steinem, an antiques dealer, spent winters selling his wares from a house trailer, usually with his wife, Ruth, Gloria, and her older sister Suzanne. Gloria did not spend a full year in school until she was twelve. In the summers, her father ran a beach resort in Michigan. Her mother had gone to the University of Toledo and started a career as a journalist, but discrimination against women was so blatant (and so taken for granted) that she initially had to write her articles under a man’s name. She eventually gave up her career and fell victim to depression.
After her parents divorced, Steinem, then eleven years old, became her mother’s caretaker, cook, and housekeeper, and the family lived in difficult financial circumstances. In her teens, she worked as a salesgirl after school and on Saturdays, and also earned $10 a night dancing in local clubs. Suzanne persuaded their father to take care of their mother so that Gloria could move to Washington, DC, to live with her sister and finish high school.
Gloria’s grandmother, Pauline Steinem, was a prominent women’s rights activist, president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. Pauline died when Gloria was five but left Gloria with vivid “sense memories” of her strength, courage, and intelligence.
At Smith College, Steinem majored in government, graduating magna cum laude. She was awarded a fellowship to study for two years in India, still in its first decade of independence from the British empire. Steinem moved to New York City in 1960 to pursue a career as a journalist. She worked for a new magazine of political satire, Help!, edited by Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of MAD magazine, and contributed short articles to women’s magazines, such as Glamour and Ladies’ Home Journal. After writing several pieces for Esquire, a men’s magazine, without being credited, she finally published her first bylined article in 1962, about the then-new contraceptive pill. The article, published a year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in bookstores, examined the fact that women often had to choose between a career and marriage. “The only trouble with sexually liberating women,” Steinem ended the article, “is that there aren’t enough sexually liberated men to go around.”
Steinem made a big splash in 1963 with “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” an article for Show magazine about working at a Playboy Club. The article exposed the decidedly unglamorous working conditions (including sexual harassment) faced by the club’s waitresses—called “bunnies”—who were required to wear a corset, rabbit ears, cotton tails, and high heels.
Steinem made a living as a freelance writer—profiling celebrities and writing about popular culture for major publications—but she could not persuade editors to assign her serious political subjects. Eventually she began writing a column for New York magazine, which she helped launch in 1968. She wrote about Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s years living in New York, Nelson Rockefeller’s visit to Latin America on behalf of President Richard Nixon, wounded veterans returning from Vietnam, neighborhood battles over childcare centers, antiwar demonstrations, migrant workers, the New York City mayoral race, and the 1968 presidential campaign, among other subjects.
Two articles established her as a feminist spokesperson. The first was a 1969 article in New York magazine, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which profiled the burgeoning women’s movement. The second was “What It Would Be Like if Women Win,” a 1970 essay in Time magazine that predicted that feminism would liberate men as well as women. If women could have equal power, homosexuals had the right to marry, and women could refuse to have sex, men could no longer be “the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility.”
During her first several decades as a public figure, Steinem had to endure media stereotypes that called her the “pin-up girl of the intelligentsia” or a “willowy beauty, 34-24-34.” And she also had to deal with some feminist leaders who resented her visibility in the media. But more than any other figure, she was the public face of modern feminism, a constant presence on college campuses, at union halls, in business meetings, at protests and rallies, on TV talk shows, and in media profiles. A kind of feminist diplomat, Steinem sought to build bridges between the radical or socialist and liberal wings of the women’s movement. She was a bridge between the predominantly white feminist movement and African American feminists and, as a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, among the women’s movement, unions, and mainstream politicians. She explained feminism to the general public, including men, to change public opinion on such issues as job discrimination, sexual harassment, abortion, gender roles in marriage, and stereotypes about women in the media and religion.
Steinem consistently injected issues of race and class into the women’s movement, pushing middle-class white feminists to recruit and embrace the concerns of working-class women and women of color. She never promoted the view that women are essentially different from men.
Feminism, she said in 1971, “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.”
Steinem often used outrageous ideas to shake up her readers and audiences. In 1971 she stunned parents and alums at the Smith College graduation by quoting her friend Flo Kennedy’s observation that “there are only a few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina.” She once told an audience of CEOs that a fair society would eliminate all inheritance. She has compared marriage to prostitution and said that unpaid housework “is the definition of women’s work, which is shit work.” In speeches, she frequently drew on the theme of her 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate.”
Although Steinem wrote hundreds of articles and five books and gave thousands of speeches, her most significant accomplishments involve the creation of two institutions—Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus—that have become major influences in American culture and politics.
Ms. was the first modern feminist periodical with a national readership. Steinem served as editor from 1972 until 1987 and since then has served as a contributing editor. In its early years the magazine was considered so controversial that some conservative groups successfully sought to ban it from public libraries and some bookstores refused to carry it. Its very name was controversial, a new word invented by feminists to give women an option other than being identified by their status as married (“Mrs.”) or unmarried (“Miss”). The word “Ms.” raised awareness of how language reflected sexist thinking and stereotypes, leading to momentous changes in everyday speech.
From its earliest days Ms. challenged conventional wisdom in articles like “How to Write Your Marriage Contract,” “Can Women Love Women?” “The Black Family and Feminism,” “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” and “Down with Sexist Upbringing.” In its first year, Ms. made history when it published the names of women, including Billie Jean King, who admitted to having had abortions before the US Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, when it was still illegal in most of the country. Its 1976 cover story on battered women—which featured a photo of a woman with a bruised faced—was the first major exposé of the problem of domestic violence.
The magazine pioneered investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the wage gap, the glass ceiling, women’s health (and the medical establishment’s sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape. It explained and advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, rated presidential candidates on women’s issues, reported on feminist protests against pornography, exposed the influence of sexist advertising on women’s self-images, and acknowledged race and class differences within the feminist movement.
Ms. injected these issues into the political debate at a time when they were considered too radical for the mainstream media to cover—or at least, to cover fairly.
In 1971 Steinem joined a bipartisan group of women—including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Dorothy Height (president of the National Council of Negro Women)—to launch the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). Unlike the National Organization for Women, which utilized diverse strategies, the NWPC’s explicit goal was to increase women’s participation in politics, particularly as elected officials, to make it easier to pass legislation to eliminate sex discrimination and bring about greater legal, economic, and social equality.
The NWPC has recruited women to run for office, sponsored nuts-and-bolts campaign training workshops for women candidates and campaign staffers, monitored the progress of women in public office and party positions, lobbied for rules guaranteeing women a greater voice in party activities, and endorsed female candidates. In 1985 feminists led by Ellen Malcolm, an heiress to the IBM fortune and a former NWPC press secretary, founded a parallel organization, called EMILY’s List, to raise money for prochoice female Democratic candidates. In the 2009–2010 cycle, EMILY’s List raised more than $38 million from over 900,000 members.
Both NWPC and EMILY’s List, and the feminist movement in general, have contributed to a dramatic increase in the turnout of women voters and the number of women elected to office at every level of government.
Steinem’s 1970 prediction—“if Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do”—is not yet a reality. But a majority of Americans, men as well as women, and particularly those under forty, now take for granted the once-radical tenets of modern feminism.