Gloria Steinem, who pushed for gender equality, dies at 92

This piece was originally published in The 19th and appears here with permission.

By Jennifer Gerson

Gloria Steinem, one of the leaders of second-wave feminism and a feminist thought leader for generations, has died at the age of 92. 

In a career that saw attitudes on women change (and change again — and again), Steinem — often with her signature aviators — served as the literal face of second-wave feminism for decades. From her coming of age during the Mad Men era to her founding Ms. magazine at the start of a new push for gender equality to #MeToo and the ensuing backlash, Steinem was a tireless champion for furthering the work of the feminist movement and promoting gender equity, even when it has meant re-evaluating some of her own past positions. 

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, Steinem’s childhood was largely shaped by her parents’ divorce when she was 10. She watched her mother struggle to find and hold a job, which, later in life, Steinem said had a significant impact on her understanding of patriarchal systems and the impact they can have on women, especially working women. Likewise, Steinem bore witness to the way doctors routinely wrote off her mother’s health concerns, often with a gendered bias, because she had once experienced what was then described as a nervous breakdown. Seeing firsthand the way society treats women — especially single women, working mothers, and those with marginalized identities — led Steinem to develop a core belief that women were inherently unequal in modern American society.

After attending the all-women’s Smith College in Massachusetts, Steinem entered the public sphere as a young journalist; one of her first major bylines was a 1962 story for Esquire magazine that came from what was ostensibly an assignment about contemporary contraception use. That article, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” became a feature-length treatise on the way American women are unjustly faced with the binary choice of career or family.

This was followed the next year by a story for Show magazine entitled: “A Bunny’s Tale,” for which Steinem spent a year working as a Playboy Bunny at New York City’s Playboy Club. In the piece, Steinem focused on the exploitative labor conditions of the Playboy Club and the impact these working conditions had on the women there, including, but not limited to, sexual demands frequently made of them as part of their employment. 

In interviews, Steinem spoke about how attending an abortion access rally in 1969 for a story for New York magazine was a life-changing event for her, one that put her on a path of being a public, activist feminist for the rest of her life. (Steinem had received an abortion herself in 1957 in London, when the procedure was still illegal. She dedicated her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to Dr. John Sharpe, the English doctor who had provided her care.)

Steinem had no biological children, but is survived by her four adult stepchildren, including the actor Christian Bale. Her husband, David Bale — an environmentalist and animal welfare activist — died in 2003. 

Steinem’s work combining journalism and feminist action converged in 1972, when she co-founded Ms. magazine and quickly emerged as a key symbol of second-wave feminism and its focus on the way reproductive rights, labor rights, and sexuality converged in women’s lived experiences. 

A key proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, Steinem was politically outspoken throughout her life — criticizing the Vietnam War during the 1968 presidential election, supporting Shirley Chisholm’s candidacy in 1972, being arrested outside of the South African embassy for protesting against apartheid in South Africa in 1984, becoming a vocal defender of Anita Hill during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confirmation hearings and endorsing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president in 2008 and 2016. 

She also found herself at the center of a cross-generational debate on what feminism is and who it is there to serve after she wrote an op-ed in 1998 defending President Bill Clinton in the midst of the scandal involving his sexual relationship with a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. In her op-ed, which ran in The New York Times under the headline “Feminists and the Clinton Question,” Steinem sharply criticized those calling for the president’s resignation or impeachment in light of his behavior with Lewinsky and other women who had come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct, arguing that much of the right-wing vitriol aimed at Clinton was in fact because of his support for reproductive rights. 

Perhaps even more notably, she said to condemn Clinton’s behavior was to also work against one of the key wins of the feminist movement: asserting women’s sexual independence and agency. Steinem wrote that by the letter of the law, Clinton had not engaged in any form of sexual harassment because his sexual relationship with Lewinsky was consensual. This relationship, she said, was clearly explained, and without fault, by “the common-sense guideline to sexual behavior that came out of the women’s movement 30 years ago: no means no; yes means yes.”

Decades later, in the throes of 2017’s #MeToo movement and the public reckoning with and reevaluation of the Lewinsky situation through a lens of power differentials, Steinem told reporters that in the present day, she might have written about Clinton differently. 

The Clinton op-ed in many ways perfectly encapsulates the life and legacy of Gloria Steinem: A woman who changed the landscape in terms of what it meant to think about women’s power and agency, most notably through the written word — and a woman whose hand in the creation of second wave feminism, and its failures to often operate in an intersectional manner, gave Americans reason to pause and reconsider just who is being served up power by what iterations of feminism. 

In the end, when Gloria Steinem spoke, the world listened — and kept talking and evolving through it. 🔥