How Gloria Steinem changed the lives of generations of women

How Gloria Steinem transformed the lives of generations of women

Gloria Steinem stood as a major figure in America’s feminist movement, and her long career covered many roles that reshaped the lives of generations of women.

With her signature aviator sunglasses and long, blonde-streaked hair — which she saw as rebellious in the 1970s — Steinem became an internationally known campaigner for women’s equality.

She advocated for abortion legalisation, same-sex marriage, and equal rights and equal pay for women, while also protesting the death penalty and female genital mutilation.

Her activism drew backlash from both men and women, along with harassment that could be as crude as it was threatening.

Born on 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Gloria Steinem did not have an easy childhood.

Her father Leo Steinem was a travelling salesman and, with her mother Ruth and older sister Susanne, they lived in a caravan as they travelled across the country.

When Steinem was 10, Leo left the family and moved to California, leaving her to look after Ruth, who had long struggled with mental illness and frightening hallucinations.

Because of this, Steinem did not attend school full-time until she was 12.

She later said she had never wanted children because she had already had one — her mother.

In the late 1950s, she went to India on a research scholarship and spent two years in a range of roles, including helping village women organise non-violent protests against government policies, which sparked her interest in grassroots activism.

Steinem left India and moved to New York City in the early 1960s to begin her career as a freelance writer. At the time, male-dominated newsrooms made it hard for women to land hard-hitting stories.

Her major breakthrough came in 1963, when Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny cocktail waitress and wrote A Bunny's Tale, an exposé for Show magazine that revealed the sleazy and sexist reality of Hugh Hefner's empire.

As soon as she arrived for the interview, a security guard shouted, "Here bunny, bunny, bunny."

Using the false name Marie, she lied about her age, telling Playboy she was 24 when she was actually four years older.

Steinem exposed the low pay of a Bunny, as well as the physical pain of wearing high heels and tight corsets for hours.

Even after the fame — and notoriety — that followed, she still struggled to be taken seriously by editors.

Although the Playboy exposé helped her secure work for the New York Times and New York Magazine, much of it was about ladies' stockings and the latest hairstyles.

"To this day when people don't like me they introduce me as a former Bunny, as a put-down," she told the New York Times in 2016. "On the other hand, I did improve the working conditions for those women."

Undeterred, by 1968 Steinem was writing a column for New York Magazine, concentrating on progressive social issues and women’s rights.

"I was the only woman, and after I wrote an abortion article, my [male] friends there said to me: 'Don't get involved with these crazy women. You've worked hard to be taken seriously,'" she told Rachel Cooke for The Guardian in 2011.

So she decided to act on her own.

In 1972, she launched Ms. magazine with a group of feminist activists. It was the first periodical founded and run entirely by women, created as an alternative to women’s magazines that usually centred on housekeeping and fashion.

Ms. magazine broke new ground, selling out in its first week of publication.

Critics — mostly men — were quick to dismiss it. News presenter Harry Reasoner said he gave it six months "before they run out of things to say".

The first issue sold out within a week and brought in 26,000 subscribers. The magazine is still published today.

In 1978, Steinem wrote one of Ms. magazine's most notorious and widely read essays — If Men Could Menstruate.

Her satirical look at how power, political and economic systems might differ if men had menstrual cycles is still cited in discussions of gender roles.

By the end of her career, Steinem had become a prolific, award-winning writer, producing many books including her memoirs, a biography of Marilyn Monroe and a collection of her famous quotes in the wryly titled, ‪The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off.

Although she is still regarded as one of the world’s best-known feminist activists, Steinem came to advocacy relatively late, in her thirties.

At an abortion awareness rally in 1969, where women were describing their experiences of having abortions, Steinem was urged to tell her own story about ending a pregnancy. It had happened years earlier in London when she was 22, just before she went to India.

Abortion was illegal in the UK at the time unless the woman’s mental or physical health was at risk. The doctor took a major risk for Steinem, telling her: "You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life."

Nearly 60 years later, Steinem broke one of those promises when she dedicated her memoir, My Life On The Road, to Dr John Sharpe.

She called that abortion speak-out event a "light bulb moment" — the point when she realised the US needed a larger women’s rights movement.

Almost overnight, Steinem became a champion of abortion rights, describing it as "reproductive freedom". The phrase she coined is credited with making the issue more accessible for political debate and is still used in abortion arguments.

Steinem organised marches and quickly became a major attraction at demonstrations, though she later admitted that speaking to huge crowds was "utterly terrifying".

After Congress failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 — legislation that would have granted women equal rights to men — Steinem co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus with fellow feminist leaders and more than 300 women across the US. The organisation worked to bring women into every part of political and public life.

That same year she testified at Senate hearings for the ERA, telling the largely male audience: "I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals all for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman."

Second-wave feminism kept building momentum, and Steinem became one of its most famous faces.

But criticism also came from the left as well as the right, with Steinem attacked for everything from her appearance to her motives. Some said she was too glamorous to be a genuine feminist, while others argued she succeeded only because of how she looked.

The media were trying "to make her a celebrity," Friedan complained, "but no one should mistake her for a leader."

US President Richard Nixon was recorded in a private conversation angrily ranting about Steinem, to which she replied: "There is some opinion that Richard Nixon is the most sexually insecure chief of state since Napoleon".

He also printed a graphic centrefold image of a Steinem look-alike and displayed it openly at the newsstand outside Ms. magazine's office building. She had to see it every day.

As she grew older, harassment of that kind became less frequent. Still, as a well-known figure in New York City, Steinem was often stopped on the street by strangers who wanted to argue — sometimes in a hostile way.

Yet she welcomed the ongoing debate. In 2020, she was among a range of public figures who signed an open letter condemning cancel culture, saying it weakens open discussion by shutting people down.

"If you care about having the conversation, surely you want to try in a humane way to convince the other person, not do away with them," she told the New York Times.

Gloria Steinem once joked: "I can't mate in captivity" — a nod to her lack of interest in marriage. But she openly enjoyed a lively dating life with several rich and famous bachelors, giving critics more ammunition.

Among them were Frank Thomas, head of the Ford Foundation; film director Mike Nichols; and Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson, who helped subdue the man who assassinated Robert F Kennedy in 1968.

"I was the one always accused of using men, of being too sexual. Someone once sent me a cartoon of a tombstone that said 'at last she sleeps alone'," she wrote.

But in 2000, at 66, she married David Bale, a South African-born entrepreneur-environmentalist and father of actor Christian Bale.

The marriage prompted surprise and even disappointment from some feminists, who had spent years following Steinem's fierce debates about marriage laws.

But she said those laws had changed at last. "If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That's not true anymore. It's possible to make an equal marriage," she explained years later.

Steinem also admitted it was a "green card marriage" because Bale's US visa was about to expire — but said they loved each other and would have stayed together anyway.

Bale died three years later from brain lymphoma.

Steinem had her own health scare in 1986, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a lumpectomy.

Gloria Steinem once said she wanted to live to 100 because "there's so much to do".

Over her nearly century-long life, she even became a skilled tap dancer.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her America’s highest civilian honour — the Presidential Medal of Freedom — and credited her work with giving more women "the respect and opportunities that they deserve".

In 2024, she turned 90. She lived alone in New York, satisfied that Ms. Magazine was still being published.

Steinem marked the occasion by telling the BBC that she hoped her legacy "might help individual people... to become more the unique, valuable, loved and lovable person that they want to be."

She will be remembered for giving women’s voices a louder platform at a time when mainstream media either could not, or would not, do so.

And in doing that, she changed the landscape and language of women’s rights in America.