the women we study: gloria steinem
the woman who made feminism part of american life
There are freedoms that become so ordinary it is easy to forget they were ever contested. A woman can apply for credit in her own name without being treated differently because she is a woman or unmarried. She cannot legally be fired simply because she becomes pregnant. A school receiving federal funds cannot exclude her from an educational program because of her sex. Women run companies, serve in Congress and enter professions that, within living memory, were overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Gloria Steinem spent more than half a century helping move ideas like these from the edges of American politics toward the center of American life. She was a journalist, an organizer, an institution-builder and, unapologetically, a feminist. At a time when the word itself was routinely mocked or treated as evidence that a woman had rejected conventional life, Steinem helped explain feminism in remarkably practical terms. Could a woman support herself, decide whether and when to become a mother, enter the same schools and professions as a man, participate fully in political life, and expect violence or discrimination against her to be treated as a public concern rather than a private burden? For Steinem, these were different versions of the same question: how much freedom should a woman have to determine the course of her own life?
before the movement
Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. Her childhood was itinerant, and after her parents divorced, she remained with her mother, Ruth, a former journalist who struggled with mental illness. Steinem later connected those years to the economic vulnerability women could face when financial independence was difficult to achieve. After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she spent two years in India before returning to the United States and pursuing journalism in New York, where the limits placed on women were visible too. Women writers were often directed toward subjects considered appropriate for female journalists, while politics and major public-affairs assignments remained harder to secure.
In 1963, Steinem gained national attention after going undercover as a Playboy Bunny and reporting on the working conditions inside the Playboy Club. The story exposed a workplace built around sexualized expectations and strict controls over its female employees, though Steinem later said the assignment made it more difficult for her to be taken seriously as a journalist. A more consequential turning point came in 1969, when she attended an abortion-rights speak-out in New York. Women publicly described abortions they had obtained when the procedure was largely illegal, and Steinem had also had an abortion as a young woman. Hearing other women speak openly about an experience she had carried privately helped propel her more deeply into the women’s movement and sharpened an idea that would run through much of her work: what appears to be an individual woman’s problem can look very different once women begin comparing their experiences.
the freedoms we take for granted
The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was often described in sweeping ideological language, but many of its demands concerned the mechanics of everyday life. Credit was one of them. Until federal law changed in 1974, lenders could discriminate based on sex or marital status. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act required creditors to make credit available without that discrimination, helping establish a woman’s ability to apply for credit in her own name on equal terms. Education was another. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities, expanding opportunities for girls and women across schools, universities, and athletics.
Employment protections were changing too. In 1978, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act amended federal civil-rights law to make discrimination because of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions a form of unlawful sex discrimination in covered employment. Steinem became one of the movement’s most visible advocates during precisely this period, campaigning for reproductive freedom, economic independence, greater political representation for women and the Equal Rights Amendment. The point was larger than any single law. Feminism was asking the country to reconsider assumptions that had long been treated as normal: that a husband would handle the finances, that motherhood should determine a woman’s relationship to work, that certain institutions or professions naturally belonged to men, or that inequality inside a household or workplace was primarily a private affair. Steinem helped make those assumptions harder to defend.
bringing the argument into public life
Her particular power came partly from an ability to move between worlds. She could write for a national magazine, speak before a university audience, appear on television, organize politically, and then translate what she heard back into journalism. In 1971, Steinem and a collective of feminist journalists began the project that became Ms. magazine. The preview issue sold out 300,000 test copies in eight days and generated tens of thousands of subscription requests and reader letters, while the first regular issue followed in 1972.
Its subject matter was itself an argument. Ms. treated abortion, domestic violence, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, reproductive freedom and women’s political power as newsworthy questions rather than matters confined to women’s private lives. For readers, that recognition could be powerful: an experience that felt isolated could suddenly appear on a page alongside the experiences of thousands of other women. That was part of how feminism became mainstream, not because every American agreed with it, but because questions previously kept outside the national conversation became increasingly difficult to keep there.
Steinem also helped turn visibility into organization. In 1971, she joined hundreds of women in forming the National Women’s Political Caucus, alongside figures including Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm. At the time, women held only a small fraction of seats in Congress, and the caucus was explicitly designed to increase women’s political participation and representation. She would go on to help establish or support organizations devoted to women’s political participation, representation, reproductive freedom, and media power. Her fame gave feminism an unusually visible spokesperson, while her organizing helped ensure that visibility did not end with the spokesperson.
the women beside her
Steinem’s public image can obscure another important part of the story: much of her political life was built in conversation and partnership with other women, including women of color who were simultaneously confronting sexism and challenging feminism to reckon more seriously with race. Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black community organizer and child-care advocate, became one of Steinem’s earliest and most important speaking partners. The two traveled together across the country in the early 1970s, speaking about feminism, racial justice, and the ways those struggles overlapped.
Steinem also worked and organized alongside women including Florynce Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm and Fannie Lou Hamer. These relationships mattered not because they erased the racial tensions inside second-wave feminism, but because they helped shape a broader understanding of what equality required. Women of color repeatedly challenged parts of the movement over whose experiences received attention, who was allowed to define the agenda, and whether feminism could speak meaningfully about race and class as well as gender. Steinem increasingly treated those questions not as a reason to narrow feminism, but as a reason to widen it, emphasizing the idea that women’s equality could not be separated neatly from racism, poverty, and other forms of hierarchy. Solidarity, in her conception of it, did not require women to have identical lives. It required recognizing that another woman’s freedom was connected to one’s own.
when change becomes ordinary
By the end of Steinem’s life, some of the changes feminists once fought for had become so integrated into American life that people could mistake them for things that had simply always existed. A woman applying for a credit card in her own name may never think of that transaction as part of women’s history. A student entering a classroom or athletic program may know little about the political struggle behind Title IX. An employee expecting not to lose her job because she became pregnant may regard that protection as basic rather than revolutionary. Perhaps that is one measure of successful political change: yesterday’s demand becomes today’s expectation.
Steinem lived long enough to see enormous gains, but also to watch some of them come under renewed pressure. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly five decades. The Equal Rights Amendment, for which Steinem campaigned for much of her adult life, remained the subject of legal and political dispute, and she continued writing, speaking, and organizing into old age.
After a life that long and influential, it is tempting to describe Gloria Steinem simply as a symbol of feminism, but symbols alone do not explain why a life matters. Steinem helped give feminism a national vocabulary, institutions, an audience, and a place in everyday American conversation. She helped make questions about women’s money, work, bodies, safety, and political power questions the country was expected to answer, and many of those answers are now woven so deeply into ordinary life that it can be difficult to see the battles behind them. That may be one of the clearest measures of her influence: Gloria Steinem helped make feminism part of American life.
