Gloria Steinem, charismatic feminist and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, dies at 92
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Eating breakfast in a South Dakota coffee shop, Gloria Steinem was all too aware of the couple eyeballing her from the next booth. He was sporting chains. She wore leather pants and what Steinem later recalled as “an improbable hairdo.” The place was packed with tough-looking, mostly male bikers pumped about a huge rally they were attending. Steinem, returning from a Sioux powwow honoring ancient tribal women, knew she wasn’t in her element.
Finally, the leather-clad woman came over and spoke up. “I just want to tell you how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years — and my husband too,” she told an astonished Steinem.
There was a time, the woman said, when rolling down the road meant perching on her husband’s back seat. But now she had her own sweet ride: “I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate, and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”
The image of that breezy, boisterous grandma stayed with Steinem for years. “I’ve come to believe that inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir. “We have only to discover it — and ride.”
Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. sagazine and for six decades a charismatic leader who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her foundation’s social media pages. She was 92.
“Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the posts said.
An activist, journalist and relentless traveler who said she went for 20 years without spending more than eight consecutive days in her storied Manhattan apartment, Steinem was a glamorous and polarizing icon who used her fabled beauty, wit and charisma to inaugurate a new politics for women.
“It’s such a cliche, but the personal is the political, and there was no separation between those concepts for her,” said fellow writer and longtime friend Salamishah Tillet. “Gloria said feminism is something that you practice every day, something that you practice in private when no cameras are watching you, no pulpit is there for you to stand behind, no microphone is capturing the soundbite.”
The world’s most recognizable feminist was always herself, friends and scholars said, even as she evolved from the face of the Second Wave to an elder of a fractious and contested movement. Throughout her long public life, she regularly opened her East 73rd Street home to fundraisers and “talking circles,” book launches and baby showers, equally at ease in tête-à-têtes with public intellectuals and watching Tillet’s toddler jump on her bed.
“My sister was like, ‘Do you know whose bed you’re on?’” Tillet recalled. “And Gloria’s like, ‘It’s fine.’”
Despite her singular fame, Steinem rarely took the stage alone, amplifying the work of contemporaries such as Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Dolores Huerta and Wilma Mankiller, as well as generations of feminists who followed.
“Gloria often said she wasn’t giving up a torch. She was using her torch to light other torches,” said Michele Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University and the executive producer of Ms. Studios. “We bandy about the term ‘intersectional,’ but she truly understood what that was.”
It was an improbable turn for a shy girl from Ohio who styled herself after Truman Capote’s socialite sex worker Holly Golightly and rocketed to fame skewering her two-week stint serving cocktails in a cheeky, fluffy-tailed bustier as a Playboy “bunny” in Hugh Hefner’s Manhattan nightclub.
Like the 19th century stunt girls before her, the 28-year-old reporter saw the undercover assignment as a way to break into the otherwise impregnable boys’ club of New York City media. Although she parlayed the exposé into interviews with Capote and James Baldwin, she struggled for years to escape its shadow.
“The story is she’s this pretty face who is the face of the women’s movement, and she had to learn how to reckon with that,” said Mariana Brandman, a public historian and curator at Smith College who stewards Steinem’s vast archive.
It was an assignment for New York magazine — the chatty publication she’d helped found in 1968 — that became a turning point in Steinem’s professional and political life. She’d gone to cover an abortion speak-out in the Village, where women shared stories of the illegal procedures they’d endured in secret, and ultimately disclosed her own.
“Suddenly I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem recalled in 1983. “I had had an abortion when I was newly out of college, and I told no one. If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should we be made to feel criminal and alone?”
Three year’s later, in 1972, her brand-new Ms. magazine featured some of the most famous women in America proclaiming that they, too, had had abortions — and imploring the government to change the law.
“They also [published] stories about women who had died because of botched back-alley abortions,” Goodwin said. “With Ms. carrying those stories and images, there was a tremendous social narrative that moved the Supreme Court.”
Nearly 60 years after she ended her pregnancy, Steinem dedicated her memoir to the British physician who arranged her abortion after she agreed to two conditions.
The first was that she never reveal his name. (She did, long after his death.)
The second: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”
Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem didn’t attend school regularly until seventh grade. Most winters, her father, Leo, an ebullient, 300-pound dreamer who was often in debt, would drive the family down back roads in a trailer, stopping here and there to sell antiques he’d picked up along the way.
Ruth Steinem, Gloria’s mother, was a former journalist who was hospitalized for long periods with severe mental health problems. From the age of 11, after her parents divorced and her older sister Susanne left home, Gloria often cared for her mom.
In an essay, “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” Steinem recalled her mother cutting her arm when she smashed a window to escape the Nazi invaders that only she could see. “I remember a long Thanksgiving weekend holding on to her with one hand and holding my eighth-grade assignment of ‘Tale of Two Cities’ with the other,” Steinem wrote.
Despite her patchy schooling, Steinem received a scholarship to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa after majoring in government. After spending two years in India on a fellowship, she worked briefly for an international youth organization funded by the CIA.
Basing herself in New York in 1960, she quickly became known for her stylish prose, sharp wit, and striking appearance. Within a decade she was “Gloria-Steinem-the-antiwar-gorgeous- bachelor girl who was pictured with Henry Kissinger in Time and Life …,” according to a breathless 1970 account in the Los Angeles Times.
But she was also the Gloria Steinem who helped start New York magazine, who wrote insightfully about the intersection between racism and sexism, and who in 1971 became the first woman chosen to address an annual banquet of the Harvard Law Review.
She zeroed in on the school’s failings.
“There is a course on international whaling law but none on women’s rights internationally,” she told the black-tie gathering. “An eminent professor of administrative law said as late as last night that he didn’t know what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was. The same man replied to a request that at least one full-time female professor be hired by answering that women faculty brought problems because of ‘sexual vibrations …’ ”
The following year, Steinem, with several other feminist journalists, founded Ms. Its first, tentative edition, a 40-page insert into New York magazine, sold out in eight days.
The debut issue of Ms. included pieces on gender stereotypes, lesbian relationships, and job discrimination. It also featured an open letter from 53 prominent women — including tennis great Billie Jean King, singer Judy Collins and Steinem — who revealed that they had undergone abortions.
While the magazine’s monthly circulation eventually topped 500,000, it also fueled skeptics. “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say,” newscaster Harry Reasoner predicted on national TV.
Ms. also took flak from some of Steinem’s sister feminists, who contended that it cast women as victims. As new waves of feminists confronted different issues, some became exasperated by Steinem’s seemingly perennial role as the face of the women’s movement.
“Guys in the media chose Gloria as our leader,” said feminist writer Susan Brownmiller in 2016. “A lot of us, our hope is that eventually, history will straighten this all out and say, no, Gloria came in a little later, and her very loyal supporters have backtracked that history.”
Steinem remained a contributing editor to Ms. for 15 years.
Meanwhile, she was crisscrossing the country, campaigning for liberal Democratic candidates, fighting laws restricting abortion, and urging legislators to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment.
“Like Sky Masterson, the wandering gambler in Damon Runyon stories, I’ve been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible,” she wrote, “and he didn’t wash his hair with hotel soap, eat from vending machines, or sit up late organizing with the hotel maids.”
In 2013, President Obama awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Her books include a 1983 essay collection, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”; a 1986 portrait of Marilyn Monroe; her 2015 memoir, “My Life on The Road”; and works on aging and self-esteem.
Over the years, Steinem had long-standing romantic relationships with a number of men but vowed never to marry or have children.
However, at 66, she broke her vow and married David Bale, a British businessman and animal rights advocate. By then, the institution of marriage had changed for the better, she later explained.
“We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws,” she said. “If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights.”
Three years after their marriage, Bale died of brain cancer. Steinem’s stepchildren include the actor Christian Bale.
At 80, Steinem celebrated her birthday by riding an elephant in Botswana.
In the following years, she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, spoke at the Women’s March on Washington, helped save her hometown’s last abortion clinic and gave numerous interviews denouncing President Trump’s views on women. She was the subject of an off-Broadway play and was honored by Rutgers University with the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies.
For fun, she danced. When asked by TV hosts, she occasionally demonstrated a well-worn soft shoe routine, though her heart was with the tango.
“It’s a sick, authoritarian dance,” she told a reporter, “but I loved it.”
Chawkins is a former Times staff writer.
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