#67/100 in #100extraordinarywomen
Gloria Steinem has been at the forefront of American feminism for a half century. Social activist, writer, editor and lecturer, Gloria, was born in Ohio on March 25, 1934 to Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was chairwoman of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education, as well as a leader in the movement for vocational education. Pauline also rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust. The Steinems lived and traveled about in the trailer from which her father, Leo, carried out his trade as a traveling antiques dealer. Before Gloria was born, her mother Ruth, then aged 34, had a "nervous breakdown" which left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent. She changed "from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving" woman into "someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book." Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill. Gloria was ten years old when her parents finally separated in 1944. Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo, Ohio.
While her parents divorced as a result of her mother's illness, Gloria did not attribute it to a result of chauvinism on the father's part, and she claims to have "understood and never blamed him for the breakup." Nevertheless, the impact of these events had a formative effect on her personality: while her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided much financial stability to the family, his exit aggravated their situation. Gloria concluded that her mother's inability to hold on to a job was evidence of general hostility towards working women. She also concluded that the general apathy of doctors towards her mother emerged from a similar anti-woman animus. Years later, Gloria described her mother's experiences as having been pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Gloria that women lacked social and political equality.
Gloria attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., graduating from the latter. She then attended Smith College and she studied government, a non-traditional choice for a woman at that time. It was clear early on that she did not want to follow the most common life path for women in those days marriage and motherhood. “In the 1950s, once you married you became what your husband was, so it seemed like the last choice you’d ever have I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child my mother. I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else,” she later told People magazine. In the late 1950s, Gloria spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow, where she was briefly associated with the Supreme Court of India as a Law Clerk to Mehr Chand Mahajan, then Chief Justice of India. After returning to the U.S., she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by a donor that turned out to be the CIA. She worked to send non-Communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival. In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine.
Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Gloria what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception. He didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article. Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year. In 1963, while working on an article for Huntington Hartford's Show magazine, Gloria was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. The article, published in 1963 as "A Bunny's Tale", featured a photo of Gloria in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs. Gloria has maintained that she is proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law. However, for a brief period after the article was published, Gloria was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was "because I had now become a Bunny – and it didn't matter why." In the interim, she conducted an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1964. In 1965, she wrote for NBC-TV's weekly satirical revue, That Was The Week That Was (TW3), contributing a regular segment entitled "Surrealism in Everyday Life". Gloria eventually landed a job at Felker's newly founded New York magazine in 1968. In 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out for New York Magazine, which was held in a church basement in Greenwich, New York. Gloria had had an abortion herself in London at the age of 22. She felt what she called a "big click" at the speak-out, and later said she didn't "begin my life as an active feminist" until that day. As she recalled, "It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament' was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn't going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive.” In December 1971, she co-founded the feminist-themed magazine Ms. with Dorothy Pitman Hughes; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felker funded the first issue. Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and over 20,000 reader letters. The magazine’s first independent issue appeared in January 1972. The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Gloria remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and serves on the advisory board. Also in 1972, Gloria became the first woman to speak at the National Press Club. In 1978, Gloria wrote a semi-satirical essay for Cosmopolitan titled "If Men Could Menstruate" in which she imagined a world where men menstruate instead of women. She concludes in the essay that in such a world, menstruation would become a badge of honor with men comparing their relative sufferings, rather than the source of shame that it had been for women. On March 22, 1998, Gloria published an op-ed in The New York Times ("Feminists and the Clinton Question") in which, without actually challenging accounts by Bill Clinton's accusers, she claimed they did not represent sexual harassment. This was criticized by various writers, as in the Harvard Crimson and in the Times itself. The original item has since been scrubbed from the NY Times archives and as noted by Nathan Dial, who reposted it on Scribd with the comment: "the fact that it's not on the NYT's page is disturbing.”
Gloria first expressed her feminist views in such essays as “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” In 1971, she joined other prominent feminists, such as Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, in forming the National Women’s Political Caucus, which worked on behalf of women’s issues. That was when she took the lead in launching the pioneering, feminist Ms. magazine. Under her direction, the magazine tackled important topics, including domestic violence. Ms. became the first national publication to feature the subject on its cover in 1976. As her public profile continued to rise, Gloria Steinem faced criticism from some feminists, including the Redstockings, for her association with the CIA-backed Independent Research Service. Others questioned her commitment to the feminist movement because of her glamorous image. Undeterred, Gloria continued on her own way, speaking out, lecturing widely, and organizing various women’s functions. She also wrote extensively on women’s issues. Her 1983 collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, featured works on a broad range of topics from “The Importance of Work” to “The Politics of Food.”
In 1986, Gloria faced a very personal challenge when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was able to beat the disease with treatment. That same year, Gloria explored one of America’s most iconic women in the book Marilyn: Norma Jean. She became a consulting editor at Ms magazine the following year after the publication was sold to an Australian company. Gloria found herself the subject of media scrutiny with her 1992 book “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem”. To some feminists, the book’s focus on personal development to be a retreat from social activism. Gloria was surprised by the backlash, believing that a strong self-image to be crucial to creating change. “We need to be long-distance runners to make a real social revolution. And you can’t be a long-distance runner unless you have some inner strength,” she explained to People magazine. She considers the work to be “most political thing I’ve written. I was saying that many institutions are designed to undermine our self-authority in order to get us to obey their authority,” she told Interview magazine. She was also diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia in 1994. Gloria had another collection of writings, “Moving Beyond Words: Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking Boundaries of Gender”, published in 1994. In one of the essays, “Doing Sixty,” she reflected on reaching that chronological milestone. Gloria was also the subject of a biography written by another noted feminist Carolyn G. Heilbrun entitled “Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem”.
Although she didn’t marry until the age of 66, Gloria Steinem has had some high-profile relationships over the years, with director Mike Nichols and publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman, among others. In 2000, Gloria did something that she had insisted for years that she would not do. Despite being known for saying that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, Gloria decided to get married. She wed David Bale, an environmental and animal rights activist and the father of actor Christian Bale. They loved each other and wanted to be together, she has said, but married only because his visa was about to run out. Still, she is glad that they did it. At the age of 66, Gloria proved that she was still unpredictable and committed to charting her own path in life. Her wedding raised eyebrows in certain circles. But the union did not last long. Bale died of brain cancer in 2003. “He had the greatest heart of anyone I’ve known,” Gloria told O magazine.
Gloria Steinem is someone who cannot sit still or stop planning. Over the years she has tried to join her friends in meditation groups, but it has never worked. Inevitably her mind races ahead to forthcoming deadlines. For her, being out on the road is a form of meditation; she has very little social life outside the movement. It’s a wonder she still has the appetite for it. Prior to leaving, she says, she always hopes something will come up to prevent her travelling. But then she gets on her way, and is ignited again, not least by the prospect of a general election in the US. Steinem was a democratic and Barack Obama / Hillary Clinton supporter.
A life devoted to a single political movement gives rise to certain habits of thought. Steinem sees everything through the filter of what it means for women, minorities and society’s least empowered, categories that often overlap. Recipient of innumerable awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, Gloria Steinem continues to work for social justice. As she recently said, “The idea of retiring is as foreign to me as the idea of hunting.”
Source: Wikipedia and Google.
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