‘She listened.’ Gloria Steinem raised women’s voices through writing and activism.
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 30/100
| Gia McKenna/Gloria’s Foundation Women gather for a talking circle at Gloria Steinem's home in New York in 2025. Throughout her lifetime, Ms. Steinem, at center, enjoyed bringing women together for discussions. Loading...
Gloria Steinem inspired people to think, take action, and challenge the status quo.
Inside the New York offices of Ms. magazine, the unofficial headquarters of the modern women’s movement she helped shape, discussions were often weighty. The staff would debate unequal pay, domestic violence, and sexual harassment, but Ms. Steinem brought levity and fun.
Gloria Steinem overcame a fear of public speaking to become one of the most influential voices in the women’s rights movement. Her talent for making feminist ideas accessible to a broader audience helped bring about significant social change.
“I don’t think there’s any office anywhere except maybe for a late-night talk show where people laughed so much,” says Suzanne Braun Levine, who served as the first editor of Ms. “And Gloria, of course, was the funniest. I mean, she had an unbelievably deadly wit and a creative wit. She was able to make you laugh even when something terrible was happening.”
Ms. Steinem, who died Wednesday at 92 at her home in New York, spent some six decades championing equality in every aspect of life. She took things that were intensely private in a woman’s experience – abortion access, childcare, domestic work, sexual assault, unequal access to credit – and brought them out into the open through marches, speeches, talking circles, and the written word. As her work progressed, she linked gender equality to broader human rights, such as racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and freedom from violence.
With her signature middle-part hairstyle and, for a time, aviator glasses, she was the stylish and ultracool face of feminism who could charm people into listening to what she had to say.
“Steinem was at the helm of creating this mass media space of feminism that didn’t exist before,” says Amy Farrell, a professor of American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dickinson College. “She was extremely energetic. She was beautiful. She was savvy. She knew how to say things that would be both brave, but wouldn’t be a land mine. ... [She had] a kind of extraordinary power to ... claim a space of connection and sisterhood.”
Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Ms. Steinem, the younger of two daughters, spent much of her childhood on the road with her parents – her father was an itinerant antiques salesman – and attended school only intermittently until middle school. Between her parents’ separation and the time she left for Smith College in Massachusetts, she cared for her mother, who struggled with what Ms. Steinem recounted as severe mental illness. She later suggested that the experience might have influenced her decision not to have children – a choice she said she never regretted, despite being frequently questioned about it.
Photo Courtesy of Gloria’s Foundation Gloria Steinem aboard the Queen Elizabeth in 1954, on her way to Europe for a study-abroad program at Smith College. After graduation, Ms. Steinem earned a postgraduate fellowship to India, where she met followers of Gandhi, which proved influential to her activism. Ms. Steinem graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1956 and spent two years on a postgraduate fellowship in India, alongside followers of Gandhi, which proved influential to her activism. She moved to New York City in 1960 to begin a journalism career at a time when newsrooms were dominated by men and when women writers were often relegated to covering subjects such as “food, makeup, babies, and celebrities,” as she told NPR in 2020.
Her interest in covering politics was dissuaded by editors. One particular assignment had her writing about textured stockings that she once described as “ a low point of my life .” But Ms. Steinem took on the assignment with gusto. “I was disappointed that this was what I was stuck with, but I did try to get absorbed. I researched the hell out of textured stockings,” she told The Guardian in 2011 .
Ms. Braun Levine, who later became the first woman editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, says Ms. Steinem was one of the most thorough writers she ever worked with.
“She didn’t just sit down and write. She prepared. And she was brilliant,” says Ms. Braun Levine. “Her writing wasn’t accusatory, and it wasn’t snarky. And I think that made it especially persuasive.”
Ms. Steinem famously worked undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 for a piece for Show magazine to reveal the working conditions at New York’s Playboy Club in “A Bunny’s Tale.” When she later joined the editorial board of the newly launched New York Magazine, she took on more political topics, including covering an abortion “speak-out” in 1969, during which women shared their stories. She had not yet told anyone about her own secret abortion at the age of 22. Covering that event was what she would describe as a “big click” moment that launched her career as a women’s rights activist.
She joined others already working in the women’s movement – Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug – and helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, which sought to increase women’s participation and power throughout politics. That same year, Ms. magazine was launched as an insert in New York Magazine. The editor at the time, Clay Felker, later funded the launch of Ms. under its own masthead in 1972, with Ms. Steinem as co-founder and editor.
Irene Neves/Gloria’s Foundation Staff members of Ms. magazine, including Gloria Steinem (back, from left), Suzanne Braun Levine, Joanne Edgar, Pat Carbine, Letty Pogrebin, and Mary Thom, gather for a photo during the 1980s. Ms. Braun Levine, the first editor of the magazine, recalled that the magazine's office was full of laughter, even amid difficult stories. When the first standalone issue of Ms. hit newsstands, all 300,000…
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