Gloria Steinem, a trailblazing journalist and activist who devoted her life to fighting for women’s rights, died on Wednesday. She was 92…
Starting in the 1960s, at a time when women were largely limited to domestic roles, Steinem challenged gender stereotypes and championed feminist ideals like equality, sisterhood and reproductive freedom. In doing so, she inspired generations of women to do the same. Today, she’s a household name that is synonymous with the women’s rights movement.
“Because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve,” then-President Barack Obama said when he awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her commitment to activism in 2013. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”
Gloria Steinem, trailblazing journalist and activist, dies at 92
Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92
She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.
Anyone under about 50-ish might not believe it, but when I graduated from college in 1970, the classified ads were listed as “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female.” Guess which category the good, well-paying jobs were in. A woman couldn’t get a credit card in her own name. Men were routinely paid more than women for doing identical work. I worked in a bakery (the factory where everything was made) where this was well-known. When I was in the first grade in 1954, I thought the only thing girls who wanted careers could be were a teacher, a ballerina, or a nurse, and no one advised me otherwise.
The TV series Mad Men portrays some of this culture.
We’ve come a long way…and now we’re backsliding…
Gloria fought and accomplished a lot. If you can’t access this article, find one about her life. Contrary to her sophisticated appearance and manner in later life, she led a rocky and peripatetic childhood and didn’t attend one full year of school until the sixth grade.
While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.
Did she make and impact on me? Certainly she did. And what affected me the most of all she did, I think, was mentioned above, that she changed how women thought about themselves. You have no idea how much that changed things.
I was wondering why I kept seeing photos of her pop up today. I’m in my fifties, and even for me it’s tough to contemplate what life was like for women when Steinem was growing up and fully appreciate her work.
To be fair, I think we women also use our periods as a chance to brag to our close girlfriends about ourselves. However, we covertly brag by describing in great detail about how much we suffer through them. We relish talking about how painful and messy our periods are, and all the emotional turmoil we have to slog through. We really like to complain. It’s telling how masochistic feminine complaining (My suffering is soo much worse than yours!) can be.
Anyway, good rest to her. Gloria Steinem really was an icon, and she made tremendous positive change in the world. We must fight to preserve and push forward from here.
She was a great role model when I grew up in Northern Idaho, then again when I later joined the USAF. She taught me how to spot the prejudicial crap women went through, and how to fight against it.
She was one of the main founders of MS magazine, whose name put the term in permanent public consciousness and use. No other women’s magazine had the political content and clout, or ran so many pointed articles on women’s interests outside of the kitchen.
People today totally forget how much hate she got for standing up politically for women’s causes, including abortion.
But here’s a fun fact: she’s Christian Bale’s stepmother.
She certainly had an impact on me. The girls I dated in high school, born in the early 1960s, had mothers (like mine) who were told they needed a man to be complete. Those mothers, through the influence and work of women like Steinem, raised their daughters to know better. Alas, there were no male role models to tell young men of my generation the same thing. We had to learn from the women we knew.