Born on 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Gloria Steinem grew up in a travelling caravan with her father Leo, mother Ruth and sister Susanne.
After her father left for California when she was ten, Steinem cared for a mother plagued by mental illness and did not attend school full‑time until she was twelve.
A scholarship took her to India in the late 1950s, where she spent two years assisting rural women in organising non‑violent protests.
The experience sparked her interest in grassroots activism and, on returning to the United States, she settled in New York City to work as a freelance writer amid a male‑dominated newsroom culture.
Steinem’s first major breakthrough came in 1963 when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny, writing the exposé “A Bunny’s Tale” for Show magazine.
The piece revealed the harsh conditions and sexism of the Playboy clubs and later helped her secure assignments for the New York Times and New York Magazine, although she continued to be dismissed by some editors, later recalling how she was still introduced as a former Bunny.
In 1972 Steinem co‑founded Ms. magazine, the first U.S. publication wholly created and run by women. The inaugural issue sold out within a week, attracting 26,000 subscribers, and the title became a platform for feminist debate, publishing notable essays such as the 1978 satire “If Men Could Menstruate”.
A 1969 abortion‑rights rally in the United States marked a turning point when Steinem recounted a personal experience of terminating a pregnancy in London at age 22 – an act illegal there at the time. She later coined the term “reproductive freedom”, a phrase that remains central to abortion discourse in the United States.
Following the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970, Steinem helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and testified before the Senate, describing the discrimination she faced in public spaces.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s she campaigned for same‑sex marriage, protested the death penalty and opposed female genital mutilation, while also weathering criticism from both the right and left, including personal attacks from figures such as President Richard Nixon and publisher Al Goldstein.
Later controversies involved a 1977 essay on transgender people, which Steinem clarified in 2013 as being taken out of context, and a 1998 New York Times piece defending President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, a stance she later regretted.
In 2020 she joined other public figures in signing an open letter warning against cancel culture, insisting that robust debate should remain civil.
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Category: International
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