Feminist, journalist, and social activist Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at 92. She is survived by countless generations of women who came into their own in part thanks to her leadership and inspiration.
I am one of them.
Her wit, wisdom, and, yes, beauty put a new face on the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970’s, and her fame and celebrity redefined what a woman aging in modern America looks like. (At the National Press Club in 1984, she proudly declared, “This is what 50 looks like.” I was there, and I remember thinking she had more to work with than most of us, but I appreciated the sentiment.)
I was at Newsweek, working as a “Girl Friday” in the Atlanta bureau when the magazine put her on the cover in August 1971 with her signature aviator glasses to herald “The New Woman.” A lot of turmoil behind the scenes went into that cover. Newsweek and the other news magazines of the era were late to recognize the ground-shaking power of the women’s movement. To write the cover story, Newsweek’s male editors thought they needed a woman—a noble instinct perhaps, but because of gender bias in hiring, there was no obvious woman on staff to comfortably assign the piece to. Instead, an outside writer, Helen Dudar, an accomplished journalist with the New York Post, was brought in.
At the time, Newsweek owner and publisher Katherine Graham knew little about feminism; her meeting with Steinem, gracious and patient, was eye-opening. “She educated Kay in ‘feminism 101′ as she called it,” recalled Lynn Povich, a writer with Newsweek who later became the magazine’s first female senior editor. Initially wary, Graham gave Steinem $20,000 seed money to start Ms. Magazine, which launched the following year, in 1972. It was a breakthrough for Steinem – and for Graham, whose best friend, Washington Post columnist Meg Greenfield, was adamantly opposed to women’s liberation.
Newsweek called Steinem “the unlikely guru” of the Women’s Movement. She came of age during the same era as lawyer and legislator Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. But she was younger than these pioneers, with a beauty whose softness conveyed the message that feminists were not all women who couldn’t get a man, or who didn’t want a man.
When TIME magazine ran a congratulatory item on Steinem’s marriage to the South African-born British animal rights activist David Bale in September 2000, when she was 66, it reminded her of a quote attributed to her: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Steinem subsequently credited Australian writer and social activist Irina Dunn with the line while validating its sentiment. She told British newspaper The Telegraph that it was not her attitude that had changed. “We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws. 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,” she said. “That’s not true anymore.”
The couple married in Oklahoma in a private ceremony at the home of Steinem’s friend, Wilma Mankiller, the first Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale, tragically died three years later in 2003 of brain lymphoma.
Steinem called New York City home, or more accurately her home base, because of her extensive travel promoting various causes. (Steinem loved being on the road, living out of suitcases to such a great extent that the late feminist academic Carolyn Heilbrun noted there were unpacked boxes decades later in the Manhattan apartment she bought in 1968.) In 2015, she published My Life on the Road, a book dedicated to the doctor who performed the abortion that she had in London when she was 22.
An excerpt on her website explains the perpetual motion that sustained her, and that had been her life since childhood:
“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”
