Gloria Steinem

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Early life and education

Gloria Marie Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Her mother was Presbyterian, mostly of German (including Prussian) and some Scottish descent. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg, Germany, and Radziejów, Poland. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and was the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. She was also a leader in the movement for vocational education and at a time when it cost $500 to get a Jew out of Germany, she rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust.

The Steinems lived and traveled in a trailer, from which Leo carried out his trade as a roaming antiques dealer. Before Gloria was born, her mother, Ruth, then age 34, had (according to Steinem) "a 'nervous breakdown', as [Ruth] and everyone else called it" that left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that sometimes turned violent. Steinem said that Ruth changed "from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving" woman into "someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book". Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill. Steinem was ten years old when her parents separated in 1944. Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.

Although her parents divorced under the strain of her mother's illness, Steinem did not attribute it to male chauvinism. She said she "understood and never blamed him for the breakup". The impact of these events shaped her personality. Her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided financial stability, and his departure aggravated their situation. Steinem concluded that her mother's inability to hold a job reflected broader hostility toward working women. She also believed that doctors' apathy toward her mother stemmed from similar anti-woman animus. Years later, Steinem described her mother's experience as pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.

Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., graduating from the latter in 1952 while living with her older sister Susanne Steinem Patch. She then studied government at Smith College, an institution from which she received her A.B. magna cum laude and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.

In 1957, Steinem had an abortion. She was referred for the procedure by Dr. John Sharpe, a British physician. Years later, Steinem dedicated her memoir My Life on the Road (2015) to him. She wrote, "Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, '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.'"

In the late 1950s, Steinem spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow. She was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and later modeled her campaign work after Gandhi's independence movement. After returning to the United States, she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded by foundations that were turn funded in secret by the CIA. She worked to send non-communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival. In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine.

Journalism

Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception; he did not like her first draft and had her re-write the article. Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year.

In 1963, while working on an article for Huntington Hartford's Show magazine, Steinem was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. The resulting article, published in 1963 as "A Bunny's Tale", featured a photo of Steinem in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs. Steinem maintained that she was proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the Bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law. For a brief period after the article was published, Steinem was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was "because [she] had now become a Bunny—and it didn't matter why". In response to the article, Hugh Hefner, the owner of Playboy, wrote a letter stating he would remove requirements for Bunnies to get gynecological exams and STD testing.

In the interim, Steinem conducted an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1964. In 1965, she wrote for NBC-TV's weekly satirical revue, That Was the Week That Was (TW3), contributing a regular segment entitled "Surrealism in Everyday Life". Steinem eventually landed a job at Felker's newly founded New York magazine in 1968.

In 1969, Steinem covered for New York magazine an abortion speak-out that was held in a church basement in Greenwich Village, New York. Steinem had had an abortion in London at the age of 22. She felt what she called a "big click" at the speak-out, and later said she didn't "begin my life as an active feminist" until that day.

As she recalled, "It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament' was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn't going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn't tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn't [positive]." She also said, "In later years, if I'm remembered at all it will be for inventing a phrase like 'reproductive freedom' ... as a phrase it includes the freedom to have children or not to. So it makes it possible for us to make a coalition."

In 1972, Steinem co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. alongside founding editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Pat Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mary Peacock; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felker funded the first issue. Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters.

On January 24, 1972, Steinem spoke at the National Press Club.

In 1974, Ms. collaborated with public television to produce the television program Woman Alive!, and Steinem was featured in the first episode in her role as co-founder of Ms. magazine. The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and served on the advisory board.

Steinem spoke at the 1977 National Women's Conference among other speakers, including Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Bella Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Cecilia Burciaga, Lenore Hershey, and Jean O'Leary.

In 1978, Steinem wrote a semi-satirical essay for Cosmopolitan titled "If Men Could Menstruate" in which she imagined a world where men menstruate instead of women. She concluded in the essay that in such a world, menstruation would become a badge of honor with men comparing their relative sufferings, rather than the source of shame that it had been for women.

On March 22, 1998, Steinem published an op-ed in The New York Times ("Feminists and the Clinton Question") in which she claimed that Bill Clinton's alleged behavior did not constitute sexual harassment, although she did not actually challenge the accounts by his accusers. The op-ed was criticized by various writers, as in the Harvard Crimson and in the Times itself. In 2017, Steinem, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, stood by her 1998 New York Times op-ed, but also said: "I wouldn't write the same thing now."

Early activism (1968–1976)

In 1968, Steinem signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. The following year, her article "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" brought her to national fame as a feminist leader. As such she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in its favor in 1970. That same year she published her essay on a utopia of gender equality, "What It Would Be Like If Women Win", in Time magazine.

On July 10, 1971, Steinem was one of more than three hundred women who founded the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), also including such notables as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Myrlie Evers-Williams. As a co-convener of the Caucus, she delivered the speech "Address to the Women of America", stating in part:

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

In 1972, she ran as a delegate for Shirley Chisholm in New York, but lost. In March of the following year, she addressed the first national conference of Stewardesses for Women's Rights, which she continued to support until it folded in the spring of 1976.

Steinem, who grew up reading Wonder Woman comics, was also a key player in the restoration of Wonder Woman's powers and traditional costume, which were restored in issue #204 (January–February 1973). Steinem, offended that the most famous female superhero had been depowered, had placed Wonder Woman (in costume) on the cover of the first issue of Ms. (1972)—Warner Communications, DC Comics' owner, was also an investor in Ms.—which also contained an appreciative essay about the character. In doing so, Steinem forced the firing of Samuel R. Delany who had taken over scripting duties with issue #202. Delany was supposed to write a six-issue story arc, which would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic where Wonder Woman was to defend women trying to use their services. The story outlines and the work already done on the issues were scrapped, something that Steinem was not aware of and made no attempt to rectify.

In 1976, the first women-only Passover seder was held in Esther M. Broner's New York City apartment and led by Broner, with 13 women attending, including Steinem.

Later activism (1980s–1990s)

In 1984, Steinem was arrested along with a number of members of Congress and civil rights activists for disorderly conduct outside the South African embassy while protesting against the South African apartheid system.

At the outset of the Gulf War in 1991, Steinem, along with prominent feminists Robin Morgan and Kate Millett, publicly opposed a U.S. war in the Middle East and asserted the ostensible goal of "defending democracy" was a pretense. That same year, she voiced strong support for Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings and predicted that one day Hill herself would sit on the Supreme Court.

In 1992, Steinem co-founded Choice USA, a non-profit organization that mobilizes and provides ongoing support to a younger generation that lobbies for reproductive choice. The following year, she co-produced and narrated an Emmy Award-winning TV documentary for HBO about child abuse, called "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories". Also in 1993, she and Rosilyn Heller co-produced an original TV movie for Lifetime, "Better Off Dead", which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty.

Despite her influence in the feminist movement, Steinem also drew criticism from some feminists, who questioned whether she was committed to the movement or using it to promote her glamorous image. The Redstockings also singled her out for agreeing to cooperate with the CIA-backed Independent Research Service. It was also claimed that Steinem worked as a CIA agent when this operation was taking place. According to an article released to the public from the CIA Library, Steinem's foundation was financed by foundations that were in turn financed by the CIA. However, the article does not describe her as a CIA agent.

Steinem was an active supporter of the accusations of Satanic ritual abuse of children based on supposedly recovered memories in the 1980s and 1990s. She promoted Bennett Braun, a leading advocate of this conspiracy theory, and the accusations in the McMartin preschool case, and even funded an excavation of the latter's site intended to find evidence of abuse. In 1993 Ms. magazine, which she still edited, published a pseudonymous cover story arguing that "Satanic ritual abuse exists", and she even directed some of her self-help writing at "women who had recovered memories of 'ritual or cult abuse'".

International activism on behalf of women

On June 1, 2013, Steinem was a presenter at the "Chime For Change: The Sound Of Change Live" Concert at Twickenham Stadium in London, England. Later in 2014, UN Women began its commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, and as part of that campaign Steinem (and others) spoke at the Apollo Theater in New York City. Chime For Change was funded by Gucci, focusing on using innovative approaches to raise funds and awareness especially regarding girls and women.

Steinem stated, "I think the fact that I've become a symbol for the women's movement is somewhat accidental. A woman member of Congress, for example, might be identified as a member of Congress; it doesn't mean she's any less of a feminist but she's identified by her nearest male analog. Well, I don't have a male analog so the press has to identify me with the movement. I suppose I could be referred to as a journalist, but because Ms. is part of a movement and not just a typical magazine, I'm more likely to be identified with the movement. There's no other slot to put me in."

Contrary to popular belief, Steinem did not coin the feminist slogan "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". Although she helped popularize it, the phrase is actually attributable to Irina Dunn. When Time magazine published an article attributing the saying to Steinem, Steinem wrote a letter saying the phrase had been coined by Dunn. Another phrase sometimes wrongly attributed to Steinem is: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Steinem herself attributed it to "an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston", whom she said she and Florynce Kennedy met.

On May 24, 2015, International Women's Day for Disarmament, thirty women, including two Nobel Peace Prize laureates from 15 countries, linked arms with 10,000 Korean women, stationing themselves on both sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to urge a formal end to the Korean War (1950–1953), the reunification of families divided during the war, and a peace-building process with women in leadership positions to resolve seventy years of hostility following World War II. It was unusual for South Korea and North Korea to reach consensus on allowing peace activists to enter the tense border area, one of the world's most dangerous places, where hundreds of thousands of troops are stationed in a heavily mined zone that divides South Korea from nuclear North Korea.

In addition to Steinem, participants in crossing the DMZ included organizer Christine Ahn from Hawaii; feminist Suzuyo Takazato from Okinawa; Amnesty International human rights lawyer Erika Guevara of Mexico; Liberian peace and reconciliation advocate Leymah Gbowee; Philippines lawmaker Liza Maza; Northern Ireland peace activist Mairead Maguire and Colonel Ann Wright, a retired officer who resigned from the U.S. military to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Steinem was the honorary co-chairwoman of 2015 Women's Walk For Peace In Korea with Mairead Maguire; in the weeks leading up to the walk, Steinem told the press, "It's hard to imagine any more physical symbol of the insanity of dividing human beings." The group's main goal is to advocate disarmament and seek Korean reunification. It will be holding international peace symposiums both in Pyongyang and Seoul in which women from both North Korea and South Korea can share experiences and ideas of mobilizing women to stop the Korean crisis. It is especially believed that the role of women in this act would help and support the reunification of family members divided by the split prolonged for 70 years.

She was also the chair of the advisory board of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an organization fighting sex trafficking and inter-generational prostitution in India, founded by Ruchira Gupta. She also wrote extensively on her travels, experiences with women and the Indian feminist movement with her colleague and friend Gupta.

In 2014, Steinem and Gupta traveled through India to meet the country's young feminists, writers, and thought leaders. A diary was kept documenting their travels, "Notes on A Tour of the Indian Women's Movement".

From 2011 on, Steinem was one of the co-conveners of the Frontline Women's Fund, a project of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute along with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay and Jessica Neuwirth. The Frontline Women's Fund is a fund for women that strengthens frontline women's rights activists around the world by increasing their access to financial resources, political leaders, and media visibility. As of 2025, they support 28 partner organizations in 13 countries and manage four thematic funds including the Gloria Steinem Equality Fund to End Sex Trafficking with 13 grantees and the Efua Dorkenoo Fund to End Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) with seven grantees.

Personal life and death

In the mid-1970s, Steinem began a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, whom she met after he asked her to consult on discrimination issues for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steinem had a four-year relationship with the publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.

On September 3, 2000, at the age of 66, Steinem married David Bale, entrepreneur and the father of actor Christian Bale. The wedding was performed at the home of her friend Wilma Mankiller, the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Steinem became the stepmother to Bale's four adult children; she had no biological children. Steinem and Bale were married for only three years before he died of brain lymphoma on December 30, 2003, at the age of 62.

Steinem lived on New York's Upper East Side, where she owned the first three floors of her historic brownstone apartment building. On her 87th birthday, Google Arts & Culture launched a virtual tour of her home, where she had lived since 1966.

Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986 and trigeminal neuralgia in 1994.

Commenting on aging, Steinem said that as she approached 60 she felt as if she had entered a new phase in life free of the "demands of gender" she had faced from adolescence onward. When asked about her desired legacy, she said she hoped her work "might help individual people...to become more the unique, valuable, loved and lovable person that they want to be." In 2026, Steinem was interviewed as part of a New York Times essay asking about how it felt to reach 80. The article was released to coincide with the 80th birthday of sitting United States President Donald Trump; Steinem said the worst part of turning 80 was "losing people you love". When asked if she had advice for Trump specifically, she replied: "Resign."

When taking part in season 5 of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., comedian Tig Notaro discovered that she and Steinem are distant cousins.

Steinem died at her home in Manhattan, New York City, on September 2, 2026, at age 92.

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem

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