Over the course of her long and influential life, Gloria Steinem went from being described in the pages of TIME as “one of the best dates to take to a New York party these days” and “smashing looking Gucci liberal” to being lauded as a “feminist icon.” If nothing else, the shift in the tone of her coverage in the magazine provides a window into the change in attitudes toward women that she helped engineer over the course of her 92-year life, which ended on Sept. 2. Let’s add one more description to the list: durable dynamo. Steinem never outlived her ability to be relevant, inspiring several generations of women to organize and strive to be given the same opportunities as men.
She never stopped blazing a trail for those who faced a particularly dense thicket and she never thought small. And one in which we understand that the women’s movement and the anti racist movement and the gay movement and the environmentalist movement, they’re all linked.” Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, to a homemaker mother and a father with, she later said, only two points of pride: "He never wore a hat, and he never had a job. He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink." She didn't spend a full year in school until she was 12, when her parents split and she ended up living with her mother, whose mental health was in a dire state, in East Toledo, Ohio.
At 16, she was sent to live with an aunt in Washington. Before that, she says, "I'd never lived any place to invite anybody home to. I thought that people always ate out of refrigerators." After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she spent two years in India on a fellowship (and also to get out of an engagement), then came home to work in Cambridge, Mass., for a group encouraging American students to attend Communist youth festivals abroad.
It was later revealed to be CIA-funded, but Steinem was unfussed, saying she “was happy to use the Establishment's money against the Establishment." In 1963, she famously published a first-person account of her glamour-free month undercover as a Playboy Bunny in Show magazine. It was her big break, and it also threatened to be her curse, since at first she almost exclusively got offered assignments along the same lines. This was the period when TIME thought it important to note an appearance in which she wore “a Luis Estevez creation that consisted of five widely spaced bands of chinchilla held together by transparent black net.
In between was supposed to be little more than a bare bodkin.” She later got hired at the fledgling New York magazine, where in 1968 her first story was about Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s stint as a New York City waiter and laundryman. As she steadily found her journalistic feet, she began to find her calling: to use her charm, wit and platform to promote equality. Steinem understood the fear that these ideas stirred up in people.
In Women's Lib Utopia, there will be free access to good jobs—and decent pay for the bad ones women have been performing all along, including housework.” Inevitably, her activism moved beyond writing to organizing. In 1971, along with Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and several others, she convened the National Women's Political Caucus to try to get more women into government offices. Shortly after that she co-founded Ms. magazine, which she described as “a how-to magazine; not how to make jelly but how to seize control of your life." TIME’s writers, by this time calling her “feminism’s superstar,” finally began to acknowledge her impact.
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