Eating breakfast in a South Dakota coffee shop, Gloria Steinem was all too aware of the couple eyeballing her from the next booth. She wore leather pants and what Steinem later recalled as “an improbable hairdo.” The place was packed with tough-looking, mostly male bikers pumped about a huge rally they were attending. Steinem, returning from a Sioux powwow honoring ancient tribal women, knew she wasn’t in her element.
Finally, the leather-clad woman came over and spoke up. There was a time, the woman said, when rolling down the road meant perching on her husband’s back seat. But now she had her own sweet ride: “I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate, and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!” The image of that breezy, boisterous grandma stayed with Steinem for years.
Magazine and for six decades a charismatic leader who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her foundation’s social media pages. An activist, journalist, and relentless traveler who said she went for 20 years without spending more than eight consecutive days in her New York apartment, Steinem described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.” “I raise money. I want to do justice to the women I meet,” she told The New Yorker in 2015.
Steinem, who struggled with stage fright most of her life, talked with women at gigantic conferences and in intimate kaffeeklatsches. At book signings and on barstools, she sought their stories, sometimes re-telling them in her essays and on her countless speaking tours. Her portfolio of issues was vast, from sexual violence, female genital mutilation and racism to the more mundane injustices that helped fuel a movement for sweeping social change.
At one campus visit, the discussion turned to men who expect women to pick up after them. A young Japanese woman, silent for most of the increasingly raucous session, stood up, turned around to address 500 other audience members and said: “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor, I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.” She had never before said a word in public, she told the cheering crowd. Steinem had a “gift for empathy,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote when the feminist icon turned 80 in 2014.
And women who actually did run into her on the street felt the same way. More than a half-century into her life as an international celebrity, she remains stupendously approachable, patient with questions, interested in revelations.” Famously attractive, Steinem over the years gave hope to young women who wanted to “stand up for their rights without being called man-haters,” Collins wrote. When Lands’ End featured an interview with Steinem in its 2016 catalog, outraged readers threatened a boycott.
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