Our March 2025 birthday is feminist icon, activist, and journalist/author Gloria Steinem.
Steinem was born on March 23, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother Ruth was Presbyterian, and her father Leo was Jewish. The Steinem’s home was a travel trailer which Leo used for his business as a roaming antique’s dealer. Before Gloria’s birth, Ruth suffered a nervous breakdown which caused depression, delusions, and sometimes violent episodes. Leo and Ruth separated when Gloria was ten. She remained in Ohio with her mother, and Leo went to California looking for work.
As an adult, Steinem defended both her parents realizing her mother’s illness put a terrible strain on Leo who struggled as a provider. She also believed gender bias and the stigma of mental illness were triggers that worsened her mother’s condition.
After ending an engagement in 1957, Steinem visited Europe on her way to India where she would work for two years as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow. While in London, she learned that she was pregnant. Steinem made the difficult decision to terminate her pregnancy at a time when abortion was illegal.
After completing her assignment in India, Steinem returned to the U.S. where she was the director for The independent Research Service which was secretly funded by the CIA. Her work entailed recruiting and sending non-communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival.
In 1960, she changed careers and became the first employee of the Warner Publishing’s new magazine, Help!
By 1962, Steinem was working as a freelance journalist. Her firs serious assignment was for Esquire magazine writing an article about contraception. Much of her article centered around the way women were still forced to choose between careers and marriage/motherhood because of the stigma surrounding use of contraceptives.
In a later assignment for Huntington Harper’s Show magazine, Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to expose the sexual demands placed on the Bunnies and poor working conditions. After publication of the article, Playboy’s owner, Hugh Hefner, reviewed the assertions and made changes to improve working conditions for his female employees. Steinem was proud of the story, but professionally she was labeled “that Bunny” and for a period of time, no one considered her for serious assignments.
In 1972, she co-founded Ms. magazine with seven other women, The magazine was an immediate success. By 1974, Ms. was collaborating with public television stations to produce serious content pertaining to women’s issues.
Steinem became known as national leader in the second feminist wave in the United States during the 60s and 70s.
She worked to help pass the Equal Rights Amendment which officially failed after the seven-year ratification deadline passed. Eventually, enough states voted to ratify the Amendment, but because of the deadline there will probably need to be a new vote which seems unlikely considering the current political climate.
According to Steinem, “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.”
Steinem was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the conflicts in the Middle East. She was arrested in South Africa for attending a demonstration opposing apartheid. She also helped form women’s political caucuses to help legislate for civil rights and equality for all. Some feminist groups questioned her commitment to the cause of equal rights suggesting she was more concerned with building her reputation as a feminist instead of actually being one.
In 2000, at the age of 60, she married Dave Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale. Dave Bale died of brain lymphoma three years later.
Steinem has written ground-breaking articles about female genital mutilation, gender bias, and the transgender community. Not all of her assertions in a 1977 article were popular with the transgender community. She has since clarified some of her remarks and become a supportive ally.
Steinem lives alone in the New York brownstone she has owned since 1966.
Selected Works by Gloria Steinem:
The Thousand Indias (1957)
The Beach Book (1963)
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983)
Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986), with George Barris
Revolution from Within (1992)
Moving beyond Words (1993)
Doing Sixty & Seventy (2006)
As if Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader (2014), co-written with Ruchira Gupta.
My Life on the Road (2015)
The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! (2015), illustrated by Samantha Dion Baker
My Life on the Road (2016)