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.
—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:
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.
Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death:
This book is for you.
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 Though the term "consciousness raising" can feel outdated, I still remember those conversations the other girls and I had.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.
“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.”
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.
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. —APSteinem 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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