Gloria Steinem obituary
Gloria Steinem, who has died aged 92, was a writer, community organiser, political campaigner and a charismatic feminist activist who called herself “an entrepreneur of social change”. She spent much of her life on the road, often accompanied by equally committed fellow campaigners. Steinem loathed public speaking, but during two years travelling in India in her 20s, she moved from village to village, with “a sari, a cup and a comb” in a group countering religious intolerance. She said she learned then, as Gandhi taught, that a message was all the more powerful delivered “eye to eye”. Steinem, unlike some of her contemporaries, never recanted or modified her many causes, which included civil rights, violence against women, and the struggle for equality. She continued to argue that every economics course ought to start not with production but with reproduction, and an understanding of the patriarchal instinct to restrict a woman’s right to contraception and abortion. She was one of Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics throughout his rise to power. She labelled him “harasser in chief”, a man whose rhetoric and conduct ran counter to the values she had dedicated her life to advocating. Like many of her generation, Steinem came to feminism at the end of the 1960s. In the early days of the women’s movement, as separatists, socialists, radicals and essentialists deifying the feminine made their arguments, Steinem initially described herself as a humanist. She had had a “vagabond childhood”, living in poverty for several years as the sole carer of her mentally ill and sometimes violent mother, Ruth. Her mother’s indifferent treatment by the male medical profession, Steinem wrote later, fuelled her sense of injustice and put her on the side of the underdog. Steinem lived with the fear that she too might experience mental illness, ending up like her mother “wandering the streets in a night dress”.
In 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique – describing the frustration of affluent, well-educated, middle-class white women trapped in domesticity – Steinem was “a girl reporter” living in New York, working on The Beach Book, a compendium of extracts from literature about beaches and tips on what to do in the sun. A rising media star who was later described, to her annoyance, as “the world’s most beautiful byline”, she had already begun to make connections: she asked the economist JK Galbraith to write the foreword, and he agreed. For another journalistic assignment that year, she spent three weeks undercover as a Playboy bunny for Show magazine, detailing the poor conditions and humiliations of wearing satin rabbit ears and a fluffy tail. The resulting article, A Bunny’s Tale, made her name. Steinem became a highly paid writer for magazines including McCall’s and Glamour, and interviewed, among others, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin and Paul Newman, as well as taking on “girl writer” tasks such as analysing textured stockings for the New York Times. Concurrently she was politically active, campaigning and fundraising for, among other causes, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Democrat George McGovern’s campaign for the presidency, and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s battle for fair wages for migrant farm workers. As Steinem later wrote, she was “working on one thing and caring about another”. In 1968, the millionaire Clay Felker launched New York magazine, and hired Steinem to write a political column, The City Politic. A year later, she attended a “speak out”, organised by the radical feminist group the Redstockings, at which women spoke about their illegal abortions. As Steinem later put it, she felt “a big click”. Women were not to blame, but a sexist and misogynistic system that forced them to have dangerous terminations. The humanist had become a feminist. “Once the light began to dawn I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured out any of this before,” she said. Later that year, in New York magazine, she wrote the landmark article After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.
Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, a second daughter for Ruth (nee Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Leo owned a summer resort in Clark Lake, Michigan, where swing bands would play. In the winter, the family took to the road in a trailer. Leo bought and sold antiques and used the children to charm away the debt collectors. In My Life on the Road (2015), Steinem said it was the equal relationship she had had with her father – for all his irresponsibility towards his family – that provided the foundation for the strong friendships and love affairs she later had with men including the film director Mike Nichols and the jazz musician Paul Desmond. Gloria’s mother had been a reporter on the Toledo Blade, sometimes writing under the name Duncan Mackenzie. When her first daughter, Susanne, was six, and a few years before Gloria’s birth, Ruth had a nervous breakdown and never worked again. She spent time in a series of psychiatric hospitals, and became addicted to a sedative called chloral hydrate. When Gloria was 10 her parents separated, her sister went to college, and she was left alone with her mother, occasionally receiving $50 from her nomadic father. In Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It), one of the essays in her 1983 collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Steinem described the woman who had “lived too little”, but who had encouraged her daughters to get an education and learn the meaning of choice. Steinem laid no blame. “I knew my mother loved me, but she couldn’t take care of me.” Steinem majored in government at Smith College, Massachusetts, and in 1956, a year after Sylvia Plath, she graduated with distinction. In a stopover in Britain on the way to India and an academic scholarship, she had an illegal abortion aged 22. On her return to the US in the 1960s, she began to build a reputation as a journalist. In 1962, the year Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl, encouraging women to become financially independent and not wait for a wedding ring to take lovers, Steinem wrote an article for Esquire titled The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed. Still not identifying with women’s liberation, she wrote perceptively: “The problem is that many girls … who depend on the roles of wife and mother for their total identity are being pressured into affairs they can’t handle and jobs they pretend to like.” By 1970, at Vassar College, New York, at the first of what were to be many commencement speeches given to graduating students, she showed an acute understanding of the depth of conditioning: “Our first problem is not to learn … but to unlearn,” she said, and “woman means submission, black means inferior … preconceptions embedded so deeply in our thinking we may not know they are there.”
The women’s movement advocated no leaders, so some fellow activists were incensed when the media appointed Steinem as chief spokesperson. Her streaked blond hair, aviator glasses, wit, soft-voiced calm and miniskirts appealed. In 1975, the Redstockings claimed that Steinem had been “meteorically installed” as the leader of the movement by the CIA. Steinem had briefly co-founded a CIA-financed organisation, Independent Research Service, in the late 50s when, she said, the CIA was among the good guys. Unlike contemporaries such as Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett, Steinem never wrote a seminal work, but she was a powerful polemicist, funny and had a way with words that her critics found too pat. “The human race is like a bird with two wings,” she said, in one of thousands of lectures. “If one wing is broken, the bird can’t fly.” Steinem fretted all her life that the media opted for trivialisation when it came to reporting what she saw as one of the greatest social changes in history, the rise of second-wave feminism, which led to changes, as the New York Times put it, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom. (The first wave was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) In 1971, Steinem helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus, which encouraged women to run for political office. In the same year, Esquire published The Awesome Power of Gloria Steinem, largely an analysis of her impact on men. In a comment that was emblematic of the casual sexism of the time, the talkshow host David Susskind said: “What Gloria needs is a man.” In 1971, Steinem co-founded Ms, the first magazine owned and run by women. Critics predicted it would sell fewer than 20,000 copies. The first issue, published that December as part of New York magazine, sold 300,000 copies, sold out in eight days and attracted tens of thousands of subscriptions. Steinem said she would stay for two years, but in fact did not leave until the magazine was sold to Fairfax in 1987 – later she was part of the Liberty Media group that took it back into independent ownership. Ms had numerous internal battles about how radical it should be and funding was a constant struggle, since advertisers wary of articles such as If Men Could Menstruate shunned it. Later it went ad-free. When Steinem turned 50, in 1984, a birthday gala was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Dinner was $250 a head – it was yet another fundraiser for her causes – and among Steinem’s friends in attendance were Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Betty Ford. Two years later Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer. She subsequently suggested she had “burned out”. She went into therapy to discover why she had spent a lifetime as, she said, “Ms Fix-it”, avoiding confrontation, resistant to introspection, constantly on the move, battling a fear of overeating.
Her next book was Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992), for which she received a $700,000 advance. Critics worried that the book’s references to Steinem’s inner child meant the personal had become more important than the political; that psychobabble had taken over from protest. But her activism, apparently reinforced by meditation and visualisation, continued robustly. She went on supporting the Ms Foundation for Women and in 2005 co-founded the Women’s Media Center, to improve women’s representation in the media. As she said: “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” As Steinem’s official biographer, Carolyn G Heilbrun, said in The Education of a Woman (1995), Steinem was a woman of contradictions: the feminist photographed in a bubble bath; the loner who was always in the spotlight; the compassionate listener who seemed accessible to no one; the person who hated to offend – but who still offended many, including full-time housewives, anti-abortionists and Friedan. Friedan accused Steinem of attracting what she called “the lavender menace”, lesbians, to the cause. She said Steinem was from the “bra-burning, anti-men, ‘politics of orgasm’” school of feminism. In turn, Steinem lightly mocked the plight of rich, white, middle-class women suffering from “the problem that has no name”. It might be painful, Steinem said, but you didn’t die of it. Ironically, several decades later, during the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential candidacy, Steinem controversially gave her support not to the black outsider Barack Obama, but to Hillary Clinton, the ultimate example of the white, privileged woman. In 1998 in a newspaper column, she also defended Bill Clinton against sexual allegations, to the confusion of many of her supporters.
In 2000, Steinem married David Bale, an entrepreneur and animal-rights activist. She said they married because he was South African and needed a visa. Later she wrote: “He … loved me out of old ruts and patterns and choices.” He died in 2003. Steinem’s sister, Susanne, died in 2007. In 2013, Obama presented Steinem with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of many awards she received during her life. A year later, Rutgers University established a chair in her name to fund teaching and research into equal representation in the media. Until her death, she continued to travel, lecture and organise with a family of female friends. She gave the New York home that was her sanctuary to Gloria’s Foundation as a place for women to meet, speak out and organise. The latest of her books, An Unexpected Life, is due to be published later this month. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, she was asked her view on women’s progress towards equality. “I feel proud,” she said. “And I feel mad as hell we are still dealing with the same old issues.” • Gloria Marie Steinem, feminist, writer and civil rights campaigner, born 25 March 1934; died 2 September 2026
