Gloria Steinem’s Glamour Was a Means to an End
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The glasses, the hairdo, the bell bottoms and hip-slung belts were all wrapped up in her feminist cause.
Credit... NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images
Vanessa Friedman has been chronicling the relationship of clothing to identity, power and politics for The Times since 2014.
Of the millions of words associated with Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist and co-founder of Ms. magazine who died on Wednesday, at age 92, perhaps the most famous were those she uttered as a casual aside during a birthday party in 1974.
A reporter observed that she didn’t look her age, Steinem remembered. “This is what 40 looks like,” she retorted. “We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”
Little wonder Steinem became not just the voice, but also the face of feminism, its aviator-wearing avatar, who made it her mission to tear down the barriers around women as well as the stereotypes that helped build them. Those bromides included the expectation that age was a problem and thus something to hide, that any interest in appearance indicated an interest in superficiality and that, as National Geographic once characterized it (critically), “only plain women want equal rights because they aren’t hot enough to attract a husband.”
For Steinem, a woman’s agency included not just how she lived her life, but also how she looked while she did so. It was part of the right to choose: who you were and where and how you appeared. And from the moment she appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1971 under the banner “The New Woman,” smiling, her hair parted at the center and teased in back with blond streaks cascading around her face — and with (yes, of course) those aviators — she did it consciously and according to her own rules.
Left, Gloria Steinem accepting the Hasty Pudding Club’s first-ever “Person of the Year” prize at Harvard in 1973. Right, at a “Dreamgirls” opening night party at Tavern on the Green in New York in 1981. Credit... Fairchild Archive, via Getty Images; Ron Galella Collection, via Getty Images Her early employers may have labeled her a “girl reporter,” critics like Maxine Cheshire may have dismissed her as “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia” (and an early connection to the C.I.A . may have suggested her looks were a cover), but the glasses, the hairdo, the bell bottoms, hip-slung belts and bodysuits were merely weapons in her battle, and the troops she inspired were the legions of young women who came after. For her, style was a tool of change and a means of outreach.
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