Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem is an
American feminist icon,
journalist and women's rights advocate. She is the founder and original publisher of
Ms. is an American [i] feminist [i] magazine founded by American feminist and ...
magazine.
Encyclopedia
Gloria Steinem is an
American feminist icon,
journalist and women's rights advocate. She is the founder and original publisher of
Ms. is an American [i] feminist [i] magazine founded by American feminist and...
magazine.
Early life
Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother, Ruth, was of part
German descent. Her Jewish-American father, Leo Steinem, was a traveling antiques dealer . The family split in 1944, when he went to California to find work while Gloria lived with her mother in Toledo. As a child in Toledo, she cared for her ill mother and helped support the family.
Education and early career
Steinem entered
Smith College on scholarship in 1952,
majoring in government studies and becoming politically active in
Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. She was elected to
Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1956, the year she graduated. Steinem then studied in
India for two years, after which she returned to America and had difficulty finding a journalist position because males had hiring preference. In 1960, she became assistant editor of
Help! magazine and a freelance writer, and in 1963, started freelancing full-time with the publication of her infamous undercover article,
A Bunny's Tale: "Show's" First Exposé for Intelligent People.Political awakening and activism
After conducting a series of celebrity interviews, Steinem eventually got a political assignment covering
George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, which led to a position in a
New York magazine. She became politically active in the feminist movement, and the media seemed to appoint Steinem as a feminist leader of sorts. Steinem brought other notable feminists to the fore and toured the country with lawyer Florynce Rae Kennedy, and in 1971, cofounded the National Women's Political Caucus as well as the Women's Action Alliance. In 1972, she started the feminist magazine and wrote for the magazine until it was sold in 1987. The magazine was bought by the in 2001, and Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and serves on the advisory board.
Steinem founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women 1974, and participated in the National Conference of Women in
Houston, Texas in 1977. She became
Ms. magazine's consulting editor when it was revived in 1991, and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.
Later life
In the 1980s and 1990s, Steinem had to deal with a number of personal setbacks, including the diagnoses of
breast cancer in 1986, and
trigeminal neuralgia in 1994.
On September 3, 2000, at age 66, she married David Bale, father of actor
Christian Bale. The wedding was performed at the home of her friend Wilma Mankiller, formerly the first female
Chief of the
Cherokee Nation. Steinem and Bale were married for only three years before he died of brain
lymphoma on December 30, 2003 at age 62. In 2005, Steinem appeared in the documentary film,
I Had an Abortion, by Jennifer Baumgardner and Gillian Aldrich. In the film, Steinem described the
abortion she received as a young woman in
London, where she lived briefly before studying in
India. Steinem is also a member of Democratic Socialists of America, and an advisory board member of Women's Voices. Women Vote.
Canadian singer-songwriter
David Usher penned a song entitled
Love Will Save The Day, which includes sound bytes from Steinem speeches. The song's opening contains her statement, "It really is a revolution", and the ending breaks for the quote, "We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned; we are really talking about humanism."
List of works
- Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
- Marilyn: Norma Jean
- Revolution from Within
- Moving beyond Words
Further reading
Carolyn Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem, 1995
See also
External links
- from the Jewish Women's Archive
