Gloria Steinem, the groundbreaking feminist campaigner who personified America's women's movement, died on Wednesday at her home in New York at the age of 92. By the time of her death, Steinem was synonymous with feminism, a kind of human mascot for the movement.
When she was born, however, feminism was considered over. It had been a fad years earlier among women who were now elderly, and seemed in retrospect overwrought and out of touch. Growing up in Ohio in the 1930s and 40s, Steinem was itinerant and poor, cared for by a single mother plagued by a violent and debilitating mental illness. The suffrage movement that had won women the vote less than two decades earlier probably seemed remote to her.
From Abortion Speak-Out to Feminist Icon
Steinem attended Smith College, where her education opened up new possibilities. In 1957, en route to a postgraduate fellowship in India in her early 20s, she had an illegal abortion in London. In 1969, while working as a journalist for New York magazine, she attended an "abortion speak-out" held by radical women from the emergent fringe of the Women's Liberation movement.
The women, crowded into a church near Washington Square Park, described being blindfolded in the backs of cars as mobsters drove them to motels where illegal abortions were performed by drunk, lascivious, or cruel doctors. They spoke of threatening suicide repeatedly to get legal exemptions, and of lying in hospital wards hemorrhaging or riddled with sepsis. Their rage struck something in Steinem. She had already published her famous undercover article "A Bunny's Tale" about the Playboy Club six years earlier, but the woman she would become was born that March day in that church.
Celebrity and Political Influence
Steinem became one of the most successful and visible faces of the second wave of feminism, a figurehead who personified the movement itself. The former journalist, aware of mass media dynamics and the potential uses of her own looks, deployed stardom and glamour in service of the feminist cause. She was not the first famous feminist, but she may have been the first famous feminist of the celebrity era, forging a public persona between Madonna and Joan of Arc.
Her magazine Ms., launched in 1972, brought the women's liberation movement to newsstands across America. Steinem also campaigned relentlessly to make feminism a power player within the Democratic party, brokering her own support in exchange for policy commitments from candidates. Her powerful, beautiful, and connected image lent feminism allure and mass appeal.
A Receptacle for Hopes and Disappointments
Steinem's position as an embodiment of women's struggle meant her public persona became a receptacle for all its hopes and disappointments. She was credited with feminism's achievements and blamed for its failures, even when these were not hers. Critics have blasted her move to insert herself as the representative of feminism as savvy and opportunistic ambition, but she stood in for a large swath of feminists – intellectuals and activists, writers and organizers, liberals and radicals, lesbians and Playboy bunnies – and did her best to respect them all.
Her role was one of dedicated coalition building. The feminist movement was amorphous and internally fractious, divided by disagreements over priorities, tactics, and aims. Perhaps because of her celebrity or her fundraising gifts, when Steinem took a side in these rifts, that side tended to win. She was an uncommonly gracious opponent, willing to engage in self-criticism, engage across difference, and encourage younger feminists whose visions did not match her own. She lent her advice to feminist initiatives ranging from the anodyne and corporate to the incendiary and radical, acting as an elder stateswoman from her perch on the Upper East Side.
The Movement After Steinem
Feminism as a political movement for women's liberation is now in a moment of precipitous retreat. In the decades after Ms. was founded, grassroots activist energy diminished, and both the academy and the organized radical left largely lost interest in women's status. Social media proved more effective in mobilizing mass male resentment and spreading viral misinformation about birth control than in channeling women's discontent into political action, and Roe was struck down.
Organized feminism is now largely the province of a few liberal NGOs, righteous but battered, facing increasing persecution from the Trump regime and its allies. If feminism is to be revived, it will have to be rebuilt, and without Steinem, the task will be that much harder.
