STEINEM, Gloria Marie

(b. 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio), journalist, political activist, and founder of Ms. magazine, who became one of the leading spokespersons for the feminist movement.

Steinem endured an unsettled childhood during the Great Depression in Toledo, Ohio. She is the younger of two daughters of Leo Steinem, an antiques dealer (in the winters) and owner and manager of Ocean Beach Pier, an entertainment hall at Clark Lake, Michigan (in the summers), and Ruth Nuneviller Steinem, a reporter and editor. Steinem's grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was the president of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association (1908–1911) and traveled to the 1908 conference of the International Council of Women. Five years after her marriage, Ruth Steinem was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown (what might be described today as an anxiety disorder and agoraphobia). Although she coped with daily life, she struggled with psychological problems for decades afterward. The arrival of her daughter Gloria, combined with her husband's failed business schemes, added to her instability. After their older daughter, Susanne, left for college, Leo Steinem divorced his wife in 1944 and turned over her care to his ten-year-old younger daughter.

For the next several years, Steinem and her mother lived on the working-class east side of Toledo in an increasingly dilapidated house that had belonged to her maternal grandparents. The adolescent struggled to balance her school-work with the demands of caring for her mother. In 1951 Leo Steinem agreed to live with his former wife for a year so that Steinem could move in with her older sister and finish her senior year at Western High School in Washington, D.C. Although the reunion between her parents was brief, Steinem's mother eventually received the psychiatric treatment she needed and lived semi-independently until her death.

Steinem attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and completed her degree in government in 1956 magna cum laude. She spent the next two years in India on a fellowship and wrote her first book, A Thousand Indias, about the experience. Returning to the United States in 1958, Steinem worked for the Independent Research Service in Boston before moving to New York City and a job at Help! magazine in 1960. She quickly picked up assignments for Esquire and Show as well; her 1963 investigative piece for the latter magazine, "I Was a Playboy Bunny," established her as a well-known journalist and celebrity figure. For the next few years, Steinem's freelance work appeared in Vogue, McCall's, Cosmopolitan, Life, and the New York Times Magazine; she also edited The Beach Book, a 1963 publication of photos and essays on sunbathing. On a more serious note, Steinem worked as a scriptwriter on the television news satire That Was the Week That Was, from 1964 to 1965. In 1968 Steinem joined the staff of New York magazine as a political writer with a weekly column, "The City Politic," in which she covered the careers of the agricultural labor leader Cesar Chavez, the black radical Angela Davis, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Steinem won the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award in 1969 for her article "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," one of the first serious looks at the new feminist movement. On 21 March 1969 she attended an abortion-rights rally held by a New York feminist group, the Redstockings, that changed the focus of her career and the course of her life. Inspired by the uncompromising stance of the group, which held its forum on abortion after being barred from public hearings to revise New York laws, Steinem developed a feminist outlook that immediately informed her "City Politic" column. In addition to using feminist analysis in her essays, Steinem helped found the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) in 1971 with the feminist leaders Betty Friedan, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm. A political action committee that supported female candidates in their runs for elective office, the NWPC was just one of a number of projects that Steinem supported. The Women's Action Alliance, a grass-roots political organizing committee, cofounded with Brenda Feigen in 1971, was another of Steinem's contributions to the feminist political landscape of the era.

Despite these accomplishments, mainstream media coverage often focused on Steinem's sense of style and quick wit. One widely publicized quote had her dismissing the concept of marriage by saying she could not "mate in captivity." Another saying attributed to Steinem, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle," became a catchphrase of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Although some feminist activists were critical of Steinem's high public profile, her media savvy and sense of humor made her the best-known leader of the women's movement by the early 1970s. Part of Steinem's appeal was her ability to communicate the basic objectives of economic, social, and legal equality for women in plain, commonsense language. At a time when the women's movement was beset by internal political tensions, Steinem also was able to help unite the movement across its political, economic, racial, generational, and sexual-orientation divisions.

Steinem's best-known contribution to the feminist movement came with the publication of Ms. magazine. With the support of the New York publisher Clay S. Felker, Steinem and Pat Carbine published the inaugural issue as a supplement in New York in December 1971. The following month the first stand-alone issue of Ms. was an instant success that sold out its first run of 300,000 copies in just over a week. As a monthly magazine with Steinem as its editor, Ms. claimed a subscriber base of half a million readers by the mid-1970s. Steinem also kept a high profile as a media pundit and political activist throughout the decade, particularly in support of the Equal Rights Amendment; the proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw gender discrimination failed to gain ratification, however. Steinem's role as America's best-known feminist also generated criticism on the part of some feminists who disagreed with her tactic of working for political change within the existing system or resented her high visibility.

In addition to her contributions to Ms., Steinem published a collection of her past work in the best-selling Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), a feminist analysis of the life of Marilyn Monroe in Marilyn: Norma Jeane (1986), a consciousness-raising memoir in Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992), and a series of essays exploring various aspects of gender in Moving Beyond Words (1994). A contributing editor to Ms. after its sale in 1987, Steinem remained a leading social commentator, journalist, and activist at the millennium. She emerged from her battles with conservative opponents and detractors within the feminist movement with her integrity and sense of humor intact. In 2001 Steinem married David Bale, an entrepreneur and political activist who was born in South Africa. They have no children. She released a statement to the press saying, "I hope this proves what feminists have always said—that feminism is about the ability to choose what's right at each time of our lives."

Biographies of Steinem include Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995); Sydney Ladensohn Stern, Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (1997); and Caroline Evensen Lazo, Gloria Steinem:Feminist Extraordinaire (1998). Among the many interviews that Steinem has granted over the years are discussions with Cynthia Gorney in Mother Jones (Nov.–Dec. 1995) and Toddi Gutner in Business Week (17 Sept. 2001).

Timothy Borden