Gloria Steinem

Steinem's mother, Ruth, had been a promising newspaper reporter before a breakdown at 34 left her an invalid prone to delusions, unable to hold a job or, most days, get out of bed. Her father Leo dealt in antiques and ran a summer resort in Michigan, gone for long stretches chasing the next sale, and when he and Ruth separated in 1944, ten-year-old Gloria became the one managing the house and her mother's illness in a rat-infested rental in Toledo. Smith College, magna cum laude in 1956, got her out. A Chester Bowles fellowship then sent her to India for nearly two years, where she walked with Gandhian land-reform organizers into villages still recovering from famine and partition violence, and came home changed by watching people organize themselves.

Back in New York she wrote for magazines that mostly wanted her opinions on men, until a 1963 assignment sent her undercover and a 1969 abortion-rights rally converted her into an organizer instead of an observer. What she built after that, Ms. magazine, the National Women's Political Caucus, the public argument that the personal is political, is BriefHistory's territory. This page is about the 50-odd years of private life she mostly kept separate from the movement she came to symbolize.

For most of her adult life Steinem said publicly that she did not want to marry, a position that made her useful to critics who called feminism anti-family and useful to her own image as a woman who needed no one. In 1958, fresh out of college, she had also taken direction from the CIA, running its front group the Independent Research Service to keep left-leaning youth delegations at world festivals from turning communist, a fact she disclosed herself in 1967 and has defended since as anti-communist idealism rather than betrayal, though critics have never fully accepted the explanation. She had a legal abortion in London in 1957, illegal in the United States at the time, and did not speak publicly about it for decades afterward.

She married for the first time in 2000, at 66, to David Bale, the actor Christian Bale's father, in a ceremony she had spent a career declining to have, and was widowed three years later when he died of brain lymphoma. Younger feminists have argued with her publicly over trans rights, sex work and the movement's blind spots on race, disputes she has generally met by restating rather than retreating from her positions. In her nineties she still lectures and organizes, asked constantly, by supporters and critics alike, to speak for a movement no single person was ever going to be able to represent by herself.

Gloria Steinem's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• A Bunny's Tale article
  Her undercover Playboy Club exposé for Show magazine 1963
• National Women's Political Caucus company
  Co-founded with Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan, among others 1971
• Ms. magazine company
  Co-founded and edited for 15 years 1972
• Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions book
  Her first essay collection 1983
• My Life on the Road book
  A memoir dedicated to the doctor who performed her 1957 abortion 2015

• 1944 aged ~10 Her parents separate, and at ten she takes over running the household
• 1956 aged ~22 Graduates Smith College magna cum laude
• 1957 aged ~23 Wins a Chester Bowles fellowship and travels to India
• 1958 aged ~24 Begins directing the CIA-funded Independent Research Service
• 1963 aged ~29 Goes undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show magazine
• 1972 aged ~38 Co-founds Ms. magazine
• 1986 aged ~52 Is diagnosed with breast cancer
• September 3, 2000 aged 66 Marries David Bale for the first time, at 66
• December 30, 2003 aged 69 David Bale dies of brain lymphoma

• bell hooks 1952–2021
  Feminist scholar and cultural critic whose writings on race, gender, and class transformed critical theory. challenged her from a younger feminist generation
• Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005
  First Black woman elected to Congress and first woman to run for a major party's presidential nomination. co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus with
• Betty Ford 1918–2011
  First Lady who spoke publicly about her breast cancer and her addiction and founded a treatment center. ally in the White House on the ERA
• Angela Davis b. 1944
  Political activist and academic whose scholarship on race, class, and prisons became globally influential. different wing of the same movement