When I was seven years old, I came across an issue of Ms. magazine. This was in the early 1990s. I asked my mom what the term “Ms.” meant. She said it was a way for women to have a professional title without disclosing whether or not they were married. I thought about this and realized that I had only ever heard of Mrs. for married women and Miss for unmarried women, yet boys and men, regardless of their marital status, were called Mr. This struck me as bullshit (I was always a very opinionated kid). I immediately started writing my name out as Ms. Marya E. Gates on all my school assignments and have used that as my professional name ever since. That same year, I participated in the very first national celebration of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which was the brainchild of Ms. Foundation for Women, going out into the forest on an archaeological survey with my mom. This was my first blush with the legacy of Gloria Steinem, who co-founded Ms. magazine and the Ms. Foundation for Women. A paragon, for better or for worse, of second-wave feminism and the nascent women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Steinem passed away yesterday at the age of 92.
Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1934, Steinem was seemingly preordained for her role in the women’s movement. Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, her paternal grandmother, was a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, chairing the educational committee. She served as a delegate at the 1908 International Council of Women and was the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. Last year on the Substack for Gloria’s Foundation, Steinem wrote that her grandmother died when she was just five years old. She didn’t know much about her feminist history until later in life when someone wrote a monograph about Pauline’s life. In the newsletter, Steinem shares “I remember my grandmother for her own courage, but also as an example of the ways women’s history can be lost, even in our own families.”
Steinem’s parents divorced when she was just ten years old, after her mother had a nervous breakdown. She remained in Ohio with her mother, while her father moved to California. Steinem later recalled that observing how doctors treated her mother, as well as her mother’s inability to hold down a job helped her realize early on just how hostile the world can be towards women, especially in terms of their health and their ability to support themselves in the workplace. Stein attended Waite High School in Toledo before moving in with her older sister Susanne Steinem in Washington, D.C., where she graduated from Western High School. Steinem graduated from Smith College in 1956. A year later she had an abortion while in England while she was on her way to India. She dedicated her 2015 memoir “My Life on the Road” to the man who performed the abortion, Dr. John Sharpe, writing that he said to her “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.” She added, “I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.”
After spending two years in India studying as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow, she returned to the United States where she was the director of the Independent Research Service. In her four years working for the foundation, she told The New York Times in 1967 that she had come “home in 1958 full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done.” Unable to find funds from private donors, like the Ford Foundation, as director Steinem took funding from the CIA to send American students to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki, Finland, in 1962. Although she claims the Agency at the time was “enlightened, liberal, nonpartisan, activist of the sort that characterized the Kennedy Administration,” her time working with the CIA remains one of the most controversial parts of her legacy.
Pivoting to journalism, in 1960 she became the first employee of Help! magazine in 1960 and as a freelancer her 1962 Esquire article “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed” took on the then-controversial subject of contraception. She also wrote trailblazing articles about the sexual harassment of Playboy Bunnies for Show magazine and abortion and civil rights for New York magazine, before co-founding Ms. magazine in 1971 alongside founding editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mary Peacock. That same year, she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Action Alliance. In 2005, along with Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan, Steinem co-founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that “works to make women visible and powerful in the media.” Along with her work in journalism, Steinem was an activist, taking on issues like the Vietnam War, advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, the end of South African apartheid, and greater access to abortions for women across the globe.
Through her journalism and activism, Steinem became a celebrity in her own right. A 1971 photograph of Steinem and an Ms. magazine co-found Dorothy Pitman Hughes immediately became an iconic image of the women’s movement. Steinem traveled the United States and the globe as an activist and speaker. She appeared as a talking head on countless television programs like “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” “The Dick Cavett Show,” and others. She also appeared as herself in documentaries about other trailblazing women in politics and pop culture, such as Marilyn Monroe, Victoria Woodhull, Viola Liuzzo, Billie Jean King, Annie Leibovitz, Dolores Huerta, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mary Tyler Moore, Cyndi Lauper, Bella Abzug, Diane von Furstenberg, Martha Stewart, and Katharine Graham. Steinem even had cameos on “The L Word” and in the cult classic comedy “The First Wives Club (1996).”
Her 2015 memoir was adapted by Julie Taymor into a feature film called “The Glorias” in which Steinem is played at different ages by four different actresses: Julianne Moore as older Gloria Steinem, Alicia Vikander as young Gloria, Lulu Wilson as teen Gloria, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong as child Gloria. In her three-star review of the film, Christy Lemire wrote, “What’s elegant and efficient in the storytelling of “The Glorias” is the way it reveals how each person and experience throughout her life shaped her ideology and sense of purpose. The Glorias’ conversations on a bus ride that serves as the film’s through-line illuminate this arc further. Sitting side by side, the wind in their center-parted hair, Vikander-as-Steinem laments to Moore-as-Steinem that she wishes she’d spoken up and fought back more when male colleagues and editors discouraged, objectified and harassed her. The elder Steinem reassures her that she will eventually: “Plenty of times, lots of times, speaking your mind will get you into trouble,” she tells her younger self with an amused smile at the memory of her own feistiness.”
That same year Steinem was also portrayed by Rose Bryne in the miniseries “Mrs. America,” which as Allison Shoemaker wrote in her review, is “the story of the fight to pass (or, depending on your perspective, stop) the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment.” Shoemaker also noted that “though Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne, expertly cast—honestly, they’re all terrific) is one of Chisholm’s staunchest supporters, her own blind spots rise up with great frequency, often to the detriment of the brilliant women of color in her orbit.” According to IMDb, Steinem was listed as an executive producer on Lateef Calloway’s upcoming project about abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth, which will include interviews with 10 of her bloodline descendants. Calloway shared a peek into the project’s production during Black Writers Week a few years ago.
Steinem also inspired leaders of third wave feminism, like feminist punk riot grrrl movement pioneer and Bikini Kill musician Kathleen Hanna, whose first introduction to feminism was when her mother took her to a rally in Washington, D.C. where Gloria Steinem was a speaker when she was nine years old. In a 2000 interview between Steinem and Hanna with BUST magazine, Hanna recalled: “My mom was a housewife and wasn’t somebody that people would think of as a feminist, and when Ms. magazine came out we were incredibly inspired by it. I used to cut pictures out of it and make posters that said ‘Girls can do anything’, and stuff like that, and my mom was inspired to work at a basement of a church doing anti-domestic violence work. Then she took me to the Solidarity Day thing, and it was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever.”
Last year, the complex legacy of Ms. magazine was examined in the multi-part HBO series “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” In her review, Cortlyn Kelly wrote, “To hear interviews of Steinem in the ’70s and ’80s sharing the same sentiments on women’s rights as she does today is reassuring of hers and the publication’s values, but concerning regarding our lack of social progress.” To this point, I was struck by a moment in one of Steinem’s final major interviews, for the BBC’s 100 Women series in 2023. Even at 89 years old, Steinem still used her airtime to advocate for bodily autonomy. When asked by host Faranak Amidi what she has to say about the impact of the reversal of Roe V. Wade, the landmark 1973 court ruling that made access to abortion legal in the United States, Steinem replied, “it’s not for me to say, except to continue to support reproductive freedom, the ability of each individual woman to have the right to children or not to have children, and do my best connect with and communicate with and support women who are supporting this around the world. Reproductive freedom is as basic, maybe more basic, than freedom of speech.” On the issue of bodily autonomy, in the last few years, Steinem also put her whole weight behind supporting trans rights.
Twenty years after I was first inspired by Ms. magazine, when I was just shy of thirty, I saw Steinem in conversation with Melissa McCarthy in Los Angeles. It was a stop on her book tour for her memoir “My Life on the Road.” It was an enlightening conversation, not just for what Steinem had to say, but for the way McCarthy pushed back on some of Steinem’s outdated terminology and ideology as often as the two women agreed with their aligned vision towards a more equitable world for all. With someone whose legacy is as complex as Steinem, it’s important to remember that even though she was a pioneer and a tireless advocate for women’s rights, she was not perfect and she was not the end of the road for modern feminism, even if she helped pave it. The important lesson to take from Steinem’s life and legacy is that the rocky road towards liberation and freedom for all takes endless work. There is no rest for anyone as long as inequality for some remains the status quo.
Let’s keep fighting.
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