Steinem, Gloria

Gloria Marie Steinem (1934–), feminist journalist, activist, writer, and lecturer, was born to parents Leo and Ruth Steinem in Toledo, Ohio. After her parents divorced when she was still a child, Steinem cared for her ailing mother, who was plagued by mental illness and poverty. Steinem enrolled in government courses at Smith College in the early 1950s, a time when most women were either enrolled in home economics classes or simply not attending college and anticipating motherhood. Steinem was famously quoted as stating, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” While at Smith, Steinem noticed major differences in the privileges of men and women, also noting the subjugation of women. Therefore, she became adamantly opposed to the idea of a woman being dependent on a man for financial support. Steinem excelled in her studies and graduated with honors.

Set on a journalistic and politically engaged career, Steinem took a job at Help! magazine as the publication's first employee. She became a major proponent for the second wave of the feminist movement and wrote for New York magazine. In 1972, she cofounded Ms. magazine, which grew out of an article she wrote for New York magazine. In this article, Steinem shed light on the situation that forced women to choose between motherhood and a career outside the home, and she emphasized points that would later be noted in major works, such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Arlie Russell Hochschild's work on the idea of the “second shift.” Steinem alluded to this double-dutied second shift by explaining the idea that a woman's shift is never done, that even if a woman is able to work in the public sphere she is still the one held responsible for the household chores. Steinem's article also preceded Friedan's canonical text by one year. While her work in journalism was heralded, her work in other arenas also received attention.

Steinem actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and also founded or cofounded many other women's and social justice groups and organizations, including the Women's Action Alliance, the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Choice USA, and the Women's Media Center.

American feminist and cofounder of Ms. magazine and the Women's Media Center, Gloria Steinern has been an activist for over 40 years. She continues to speak to young people at high schools and on college campuses.

(Wikimedia)

Always returning to journalism, Steinem complemented her activism with her writing. In 1969, she and Dorothy Pitman Hughes published an article titled “After Black Power, Women's Liberation.” Steinem, Hughes, and other second wave feminists soon realized that while they were able to participate in civil rights and New Left movements, they were still the ones responsible for typing the letters and making the coffee. In other words, they were campaigning for equal rights for others while their rights were still being abrogated. In this article, Steinem and Hughes discussed such inequalities but also took on the challenging fact that second wave feminism tended to have a “white face” and was understood by mass publics and lay audiences to be largely a white women's movement. Steinem, a Jewish American, struggled to include the voices of all women regardless of race, socioeconomic status, religion, creed, national origin, or ethnicity in the liberation movement. She would go on to write many texts to address these issues. Some of them include A Thousand Indias (1957), The Beach Book (1963), Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), Marilyn (1986), Revolution From Within (1992), Moving Beyond Words (1994), and Doing Sixty and Seventy (2006).

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