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Gloria Steinem

BORN: March 25, 1934 • Toledo, Ohio

American author; editor; women's rights activist

Gloria Steinem became famous in the 1970s as a symbol of the feminist movement in the United States. A journalist and founder of Ms. magazine, Steinem enjoyed a high media profile that helped to win over public opinion on some of the most hotly debated women's rights issues of the era. She is often credited with coining one of feminism's most enduring slogans, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." However, she corrected the record in a 2005 letter to the editor of O, The Oprah Magazine. She noted that "Irina Dunn, the Australian feminist … leader deserves to be in history for many reasons, including this bit of humor."

"[T]he role of 'wife' is so inhuman and unattractive to me. Marriage makes you legally half a person."
Endures difficult childhood

Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. Her father, Leo, often bragged that he had never held a real job in his life. The family's income came from the antiques he occasionally sold and from an inheritance. Steinem's mother, Ruth Nunevillar Steinem, was a college graduate who had worked as a journalist. Later in life, Steinem was surprised to learn that her father's mother, Pauline Steinem, had been active in the women's suffrage (right to vote) movement earlier in the century, and had even spoken before the U.S. Congress. Her grandmother was also the first woman ever elected to a local school board in Ohio.

Steinem and her sister Susanne, nine years her senior, had an unconventional childhood. Their parents disliked winters in Ohio and took their daughters to warmer climates out west and down south once the weather turned cold. The family also owned a lakefront resort in Michigan, where they spent the summer months. Her mother suffered from depression that went untreated, and she was known as the "crazy woman" on their East Toledo street. After her parents divorced in 1945, when Steinem was eleven years old, she took care of her mother by herself. They lived in poverty in a two-family house, but she earned good grades in school despite her stressful home life.

When Steinem was seventeen, she and her sister convinced their father to take care of his ex-wife for a year, while Gloria went to live with Susanne in Washington, D.C. Steinem finished high school there and won a scholarship to Smith College, an elite women's school in Northampton, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1956 with top honors as well as membership in the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. In addition, she won a fellowship for study in India. She was shocked by the poverty she saw in India and returned home with a determination to pursue a career as an advocate for social justice issues. Her first job was with a foundation that sent Americans abroad to the international music festivals usually sponsored by the Soviet Union, the former collection of nations dominated by Russia that collapsed in 1991.
Undercover assignment

By 1960 Steinem had settled in New York City and embarked upon a career as a freelance, or independent, magazine writer. One of her first articles of note was "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-Ed," which appeared in a 1962 issue of Esquire. It examined the impact of the birth control pill, introduced in the United States two years earlier, on the dating behaviors of college women. Her next major assignment launched her career as a daring new investigative journalist. She went undercover for three weeks as a cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in New York City. This was one of a chain of members-only nightclubs for men established by the sexually graphic magazine of the same name. Tying in to the concept of the "Playboy Bunny," the club featured scantily clad waitresses who wore actual bunny costumes, including a headband with bunny ears and a fluffy cotton tail. The resulting two-part series, "I Was a Playboy Bunny," appeared in a magazine called Show in 1963. Steinem's article detailed the tough working conditions at the club, where the "bunnies" were poorly paid and treated disrespectfully by management and customers alike.

That same year, Betty Friedan (1921–2006) issued her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique. The work would be widely credited with launching the modern feminist movement, which was organized around the belief that women and men are politically, socially, and economically equal. However, as Steinem said in an interview that appeared on the Jewish Women's Archive Web site, the book became "very important for homemakers in the suburbs who were well educated and wanted to get into the paid labor force, but I thought, 'I've always been in the labor force, and I'm still getting [cheated].'"

As a journalist, Steinem had fought hard for equal recognition and pay from her male editors, and within a few years was commanding $3,000 per article. Still interested in social reform issues, she was drawn to the plight of America's migrant farm workers as publicized by César Chávez (1927–1993), head of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. She aided him by financing a delegation he led to the Poor People's March on Washington, D.C., in 1968, and did it with the help of her credit card. At the time, it was rare for single women to have such access to credit, and the company promptly canceled the card when the charges were discovered.

In 1968 Steinem was involved in the start-up of New York magazine, a new title that would ultimately gain fame for its investigative journalism. For a time, she wrote a weekly column about politics for the publication. When researching material for a column, Steinem visited one of the new "women's liberation" discussion groups to learn more about it. The gatherings were run by a Manhattan group called the Redstockings. Steinem's resulting column, titled "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" (1969), urged younger women involved in other social justice issues, such as the civil rights and antiwar movements, to join with more established feminist leaders, like those in Friedan's National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in 1966. Taking her own advice, she became active in the movement herself. Because she was somewhat of a media celebrity in Manhattan already thanks to her magazine career, Steinem quickly emerged as an unofficial spokesperson for women's liberation.
The new face of feminism

Famously attractive and stylish, Steinem became a household name across the United States. She was referred to by the media as the icon, or symbol, of the feminist movement's younger generation. She wore miniskirts, which were still prohibited in the workplace and in schools in many parts of the country. She wore her blonde-streaked hair long, as was the fashion, along with purple-tinted aviator-frame eyeglasses. The issue of women's rights was a hotly debated topic at the time, and opponents of the movement called feminists "man-haters" or ridiculed them as women who were too unattractive to appeal to a male partner.

Steinem was single by choice and had turned down occasional marriage proposals from the succession of high-profile, well-connected men she dated. On talk shows, she criticized marriage as an outdated concept. "Marriage is like a door slamming in my head," she once said, according to Marcia Cohen in her book The Sisterhood. "That's only because the role of 'wife' is so inhuman and unattractive to me. Marriage makes you legally half a person."

Steinem took part in various organized protests of the era, including the Women's Strike for Equality, held on August 26, 1970. The occasion marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave American women the right to vote nationally. The march and rally were thought to be the largest women's rights demonstration in the country since the suffragists' era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An estimated 50,000 participated in a march down Fifth Avenue in New York City. Steinem carried a sign depicting a violent scene from the Vietnam War (1954–75), a conflict that was becoming increasingly unpopular in the United States. The sign featured the words "The Masculine Mystique," which played off the title of Friedan's earlier book. The protesters moved on to Bryant Park, where Steinem served as host for an impressive list of guest speakers.

In July 1971 Steinem co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus along with Friedan and two recently elected congresswomen from New York State, Bella Abzug (1920–1998) and Shirley Chisholm
Maureen Dowd

Journalist Maureen Dowd stirred debate in 2005 with her second book, Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide.A New York Times columnist known for her criticisms of the administration of President George W. Bush (1946–; served 2001–), Dowd looked at women's roles and gender equality in U.S. society. "My thesis is that feminism is dead," she explained in an interview with Dermot McEvoy in Publishers Weekly. "I'm definitely a feminist, but feminism as a movement has fluttered out and as a word has taken on implications that young women don't like at all. They [the feminists] took all the fun out of it. Barbie was wrong and fashion was wrong and sexiness was wrong."

Born in 1952, Dowd grew up in an Irish American household in Washington, D.C., where her father was a police officer in the U.S. Senate building. She studied English literature at the city's Catholic University and began her career in journalism in 1974. In 1981 she joined the staff of Time magazine and moved on to the New York Times in 1983 as a reporter. Three years later, she began covering politics for the Times from Washington, and in 1995 became a columnist. In 1999 she won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.

Dowd's first book, Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004), is a collection of her New York Times columns on the George W. Bush administration. She followed the volume with Are Men Necessary? a year later. The book generated much media coverage and debate about her theories. In it, she traces the history of the feminist movement since her teen years in the late 1960s. She draws on the work of social scientists, insight from her peers, and even the advice given to her by her mother. She discusses dating rituals, commitment issues, and modern-day attitudes toward money, career, and family life. Dowd also notes how difficult it is for smart women to find dates and husbands. She concludes that focusing on one's personal career goals may, at least for a woman, leave her single and childless as she enters middle age, and neither by her own choice.

Dowd discusses other trends that conflict with the feminist ideas of her generation. She notes that many more cosmetic-enhancement procedures are being made available to women and that popular culture depicts women in highly sexual ways. Dowd explains that a growing number of newly married women are taking their husbands' last names rather than keeping their own. Many new female college graduates, she states, plan to give up their careers when they have children.

Dowd recalls the groundbreaking 1963 book by Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, which inspired the women's liberation movement. A college-educated suburban homemaker, Friedan wrote about the unhappiness and dissatisfaction that her generation of American women felt because society expected them to be good wives and mothers, and not seek careers. Friedan called it a world in which its female residents feared "losing their identities and turning into 'anonymous biological robots in a docile [passive] mass,'" Dowd noted in her book. The early twenty-first century's generation of educated young women, Dowd suggests, seem to "want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass."

Since history often repeats itself, Dowd wondered in a New York Times Magazine article if there might be a negative response in twenty-five years among that new generation of career homemakers, "now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia … deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of?" She added: "With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors—or vice versa—and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan."

(1924–2005). The group's goal was to increase the number of women involved in the political process. Steinem noted that if more women had voted for president in 1968, the victory would have gone to Democratic contender Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978) instead of Richard Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74). With this in mind, the caucus focused its energies on the upcoming 1972 presidential election. Steinem attended the National Democratic Party Convention in Miami, Florida. By now one of the most prominent feminists, she used her status as a media favorite to criticize the Democratic Party leadership for its poor record on women's issues.
Launches Ms. magazine

Steinem had become so popular that she even appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine, which called her "The New Woman." Her celebrity had earned her a few enemies, however, even inside the women's movement itself. Her critics claimed that although she despised marriage as offensive and unimportant, she was always someone's girlfriend. Some people thought she received an excessive amount of attention for her looks. The criticism intensified when she announced plans to launch a new magazine that would be the first mass-market publication devoted to feminism. Steinem called it Ms. At the time, feminists were campaigning for the title "Ms." to replace "Miss" and "Mrs." They didn't believe that a woman's martial status should be part of her title. Men, they contended, were always called "Mr.," a title that did not reflect whether they were married. The magazine's choice of title helped make "Ms." standard usage in the English language over the next decade.

The January 1972 preview issue of Ms. sold out, and the periodical became a regular monthly later that year. As editor, Steinem set the magazine's daring but coolly humorous tone, but it nevertheless refused to take a moderate stance on some of the most important topics of the day. One typical article from this era was titled "Never Again: Death, Politics and Abortion." It featured a police photograph of a naked woman who had bled to death from an illegal abortion.

Steinem's groundbreaking magazine had its critics. Friedan was quoted in the press as saying that Steinem was using the movement to make a profit. The Redstockings group claimed the organization that Steinem had worked for in the late 1950s, after college, had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a way to keep track of American students who harbored pro-Soviet sympathies. Steinem responded by claiming that she had no knowledge of the link. Freedom of speech advocates also objected to Ms. magazine's anti-pornography stance. A publisher of one of the more notorious pornographic magazines liked to print the Ms. office phone number along with the words "Call for a prostitute" to taunt the staff.

Ms. magazine's debut was just one of the high points of the feminist movement in the United States in 1972. That year also saw both houses of the U.S. Congress pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which then entered the ratification process necessary for it to become a constitutional amendment. Its first sentence read, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Steinem spent much of the decade rallying support for passage of the ERA at the state level, but there were many opponents. Critics claimed it would outlaw same-sex schools; require women to register for potential military service, including combat duty; and possibly even legalize same-sex marriage. The ERA failed to gain the minimum number of states to ratify it before its 1982 deadline arrived.
Defies convention at age sixty-six

Steinem remained active on many other levels, especially in Democratic politics. Her first book, the essay collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, was published in 1983. By this time, feminism was widely declared by the media to have died out, thanks in part to the immense strides women had made in all segments of public life, including the appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor (1930–) to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981. In 1986, a year before Steinem stepped down as editor of Ms., the New York Times finally switched to using "Ms." instead of "Miss" or "Mrs" in its articles.

Steinem wrote other books, including Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem in 1992 and a critique of women's images in the media and popular culture in 1994's Moving Beyond Words. In September 2000, at the age of sixty-six, Steinem shocked other feminists, the media, and the public as well when she got married. Her spouse was South African-born business tycoon and environmentalist David Bale, who was five years her junior. Bale died of lymphoma, a form of cancer, three years later.

Even in her early seventies, Steinem remained an influential figure. She was an outspoken critic of Republican Party policies, had established a women's media center, and was investigating the possibilities of a women-owned national radio network. Still interviewed for her opinions on women and their status in America, Steinem could deliver sharp words when she felt it necessary. Asked by journalist Sheelah Kolhatkar about the hit HBO television series Sex and the City in a 2005 interview for the New York Observer, Steinem judged it "unrealistic and self-destructive in its devotion to its idea that you can run in high heels, and that your relationship with a man is the single most important thing in your life, more than your own self."
For More Information
BOOKS

Cohen, Marcia. The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2005.

Steinem, Gloria. Moving Beyond Words. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Steinem, Gloria. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992.

Wheaton, Elizabeth. Ms: The Story of Gloria Steinem.Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 2002.
PERIODICALS

Dowd, Maureen. "What's a Modern Girl to Do?" New York Times Magazine (October 30, 2005): p. 50.

Kolhatkar, Sheelah. "Gloria Steinem." New York Observer (December 19, 2005): p. 7.

McEvoy, Dermot. "Dame in the Newsroom." Publishers Weekly (October 24, 2005): p. 20.

"We Hear You!" (letter to the editor). O, The Oprah Magazine (May 2005): p. 38.
WEB SITES

The Equal Rights Amendment. http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/ (accessed on July 5, 2006).

Feminist.com. http://www.feminist.com/ (accessed on July 5, 2006).

"Gloria Steinem." Jewish Women's Archive. http://www.jwa.org/feminism/_html/JWA067.htm (accessed on July 5, 2006).

Steinem, Gloria. "After Black Power, Women's Liberation." Jewish Women's Archive. http://www.jwa.org/feminism/_html/_pdf/JWA067a.pdf (accessed on July 5, 2006).


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