Gloria Steinem’s Feminism for All
The Atlantic · LC · trust 53/100
The activist and writer, who died yesterday at the age of 92, steadfastly fought for her belief that women could change the world together.
Jill Krementz September 3, 2026, 10:06 AM ET Share Save Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 12:19 This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
T hroughout most of Gloria Steinem’s life , two versions of her existed. Publicly, Steinem was a figurehead: the glamorous co-founder of Ms. magazine, a totem for second-wave feminism and a bull’s-eye for its detractors, gorgeously inscrutable behind her curtains of streaked hair and tinted glasses. Privately, she was a workhorse: someone who hid behind her accessories, felt she’d come to the women’s movement late (in her mid-30s), and spent much of the rest of her life hustling to make up for it. If these two identities came into conflict—the persona and the person, the superstar feminist who was terrified of public speaking—Steinem, who died yesterday at the age of 92, simply pushed on. Her politics and her life both revolved around her steadfast commitment to the idea that all women are human beings deserving of equal opportunity, and that uniting around this concept could change the world.
Steinem has said she was radicalized in 1969, around her 35th birthday, when, as one of the founding journalists working for Clay Felker’s New York magazine, she covered an abortion-rights “speak-out” in Greenwich Village, where she learned that as many as one in three American women had terminated a pregnancy. The statistic shocked her, if not the procedure—a little more than a decade earlier, when Steinem was 22 and a recent Smith College graduate, she’d had one herself. Years later, the way she’d been led to cordon it off as a private incident got stuck in her brain. It was, she later wrote in her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road , a “click of consciousness—namely, that I had been silent and silenced.” (She dedicated that book to the London doctor who had performed her abortion.) She realized that, like so many other women, she’d “been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.” For New York , Steinem wrote a report titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” one of the first major dispatches on a national movement that was starting to take form.
Steinem in Midtown Manhattan before the 1975 International Women’s Day March (Bettmann Archive / Getty) In her article, Steinem set out her thesis that for the women’s movement to be effective, it would have to be inclusive, bringing together different factions and activist groups. Throughout the 1960s, feminism had manifested most publicly as an expression of discontent among middle-class white women in the suburbs, while Black feminists worked on the fringes of the civil-rights movement and domestic workers struggled to be recognized by labor organizers. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique , a book that exposed the pervasive unhappiness of so many overeducated, underemployed housewives. By 1969, it had become clearer to many activists that forming alliances on behalf of all women might, as Steinem wrote, “forge the final revolutionary link.”
Feminists were rallying around the idea that the personal is political, something Steinem knew intimately. Her mother, Ruth, had been a reporter and an editor for a newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, and her paternal grandmother had been one of the first Jewish women elected to public office in the United States. Before Steinem was born, her mother had had a nervous breakdown, and she became addicted to the chloral hydrate prescribed to her by a doctor. Her father, a traveling antiques salesman, took the family on the road for much of every year. When Steinem was roughly 10, her parents separated, and she was left to care for Ruth alone, bringing her toast and coffee while her mother lay in bed “with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear,” as Steinem would later describe it. Steinem didn’t blame her mother for an intensely difficult childhood, seeing Ruth’s life as proof of how unequally women were suffering.
“The middle-class, educated and disillusioned group gets larger with each college graduation,” Steinem wrote in 1969. But she saw, too, that women for whom work was a need, not an opportunity, were equally deserving of representation. When she was asked to speak publicly about women’s liberation after her New York report was published, she decided to take a friend, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, with her. “Right away we discovered that a white woman and a black woman speaking together attracted far more diverse audiences than either one of us would have done on our own,” she wrote in her memoir. She formed lifelong partnerships and friendships with some of the 20th century’s most influential activists—Florynce Kennedy, Wilma Mankiller, bell hooks—and was the treasurer for the legal fund for the defense of Angela Davis.
At the end of 1971, Steinem, with a collective of writers and editors, launched Ms. , a magazine that debuted as a 40-page insert tucked inside New York . The idea for a feminist publication came about during meetings when people in the movement lamented that they couldn’t get meaningful stories about women published. Steinem suggested a newsletter. Brenda Feigen, who’d co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance with her, countered with the idea of a glossy magazine, a product that seemed familiar enough to appeal to women who weren’t already aligned with the cause. Even from the beginning, there were fractures between those who saw the insurgent potential of a mainstream feminist magazine and those who wanted something more radical. “We came out against marriage and motherhood,” the feminist writer Vivian Gornick said of the latter faction, in a 2011 oral history of Ms. “Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with…
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