Gloria Steinem, 1934–2026
The Bulwark · C · trust 41/100
The iconic second-wave feminist leaves a complicated legacy, but her essentially humane demand for equality still resonates.
Cathy Young September 4 Upgrade to listen 16 minutes 27 4 Gloria Steinem speaks at a rally outside the United Nations, New York, New York, 1978. (Photo by Bettye Lane/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images) GLORIA STEINEM, THE FEMINIST JOURNALIST, activist, and self-styled “entrepreneur of social change,” who died Wednesday at the age of 92 in her Manhattan home, was the personification of an era. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Steinem became an icon of the rising feminist movement. The fact that she was beautiful and glamorous—her first big career success, at age 29, had been an article about going undercover as a Playboy Bunny—undoubtedly had something to do with it: Steinem was a living rebuttal to the stereotype of the frumpy spinster who turns to women’s liberation because she is too homely and unfeminine to find a husband or attract men. But her very real charisma flowed from her intelligence and drive no less than looks (and was still apparent the only time I saw her in person at a 2000 event in New York , when she was 66).
Reading a 1971 Steinem op-ed in the New York Times gives the sense of liberatory feminism, hopeful and brimming with vast and optimistic possibilities:
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.
Whether it’s woman’s secondary role in society or the paternalistic role of the United States in the world, the old assumptions just don’t work anymore.
Part of living this revolution is having the scales fall from our eyes. Every day, we see small obvious truths that we had missed before. . . . We need courses on sexism and American law just as much as we need them on racism. The number of laws that discriminate against women is staggering. At least to women. . . .
Childbearing shouldn’t mean child ‐ rearing. Motherhood is not all ‐ consuming, nor is fatherhood a sometime thing. In fact, there are tribes in which the fathers rear the children, and the famous mother instinct turns out to be largely cultural.
The problem is achieving a compassionate balance, something this society has not done. It’s clear that most American children suffer from too much mother and too little father. . . .
Women don’t want to imitate the male pattern of obsessive work ending up with a heart attack and an engraved wristwatch. We want to humanize the work pattern, to make new, egalitarian lifestyles. . . .
From now on, no man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office. Politics doesn’t begin in Washington. Politics begins with those who are oppressed right here.
And maybe, if we live this revolution every day, we will put a suitable end to this second 5,000 ‐ year period: that of patriarchy and racism. Perhaps we have a chance for a third and new period—one of humanism.
This vision has its blind spots, more on which anon.
We all have blind spots. But we’re committed to creating a pro-democracy community based on truth, honesty, and good faith. Join us.
Nevertheless, Steinem’s call for a humanism transcending sex as well as race was profoundly liberal in the best sense of the word. American law and social practices at the time did discriminate against women in ways that are unimaginable today. As Steinem wrote in New York magazine in 1969:
[T]here is hardly a hierarchy in the country—business, union, government, educational, religious, whatever—that doesn’t discriminate against women above the secretarial level. Women with some college education earn less than men who get as far as the eighth grade. The median income of white women employed full time is less than that of white men and Negro men. The gap between women’s pay and men’s pay gets greater every year, even though the number of women in the labor force increases (they are now a third of all workers). Forty-three states have “protection legislation” limiting the hours and place a woman can work; legislation that is, as Governor Rockefeller admitted last year, “more often protective of men.” The subtler, psychological punishments for stepping out of woman’s traditional “service” role are considerable. (Being called “unfeminine,” “a bad mother” or “a castrating woman,” to name a traditional few.) And, to top it all off, the problem of servants or child care often proves insurmountable after others are solved.
One may quibble here and there. The gender gap in pay, for instance, derived more from differences in education and work experience than outright discrimination by employers, and the widening of the wage gap in the late 1960s was largely a result of precisely the influx of women into the workforce that Steinem mentions: Women were still flocking to majority-female occupations, and the higher supply of workers led to decreased wages. But Steinem’s broader point was undeniably true—and, indeed, the gender differences in education and experience were themselves primarily due to both discrimination and cultural biases. The era’s gendered assumptions were indeed pervasive and largely invisible.
Steinem experienced some of those biases in her own early career, at a time when female journalists were routinely steered toward “lifestyle” coverage rather than political reporting. While her exposé of Playboy clubs made her a celebrity, she worried, not unreasonably, that it would hinder her efforts to be taken seriously. The year after that exposé came out, she later recalled , she shared a taxi ride with Gay Talese and Saul…
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