People far more qualified than me have been talking about Gloria Steinem this week, but it feels only right, on news of her passing, to pause and offer a tip of the hat to a journalism, political, and cultural icon.
The New Yorker last Thursday published, on the day after her death, “Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay.” Below the main head was a quote: “When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role is to remind us how far we have come.”
You have to be of a certain age to know just how true that was for Steinem.
Steinem’s introduction to fame came by causing a stir. She worked for a brief time in 1963 as a bunny in a Playboy Club in New York City, and wrote about the experience for Show magazine: “A Bunny’s Tale.” The article contrasted the real lives of those women with the male fantasy they were hired to personify.
While the article gave Steinem a degree of fame, the photo of her in her bunny outfit did not pry open the doors of many newsrooms, whose denizens were almost entirely men.
“I could not have made a bigger mistake,” she told the Associated Press in 2011. “It was personally and professionally a disaster. In the short term, it was much harder to get assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.”
Years later, Steinem allowed, “On the other hand, I did improve the working conditions for those women.”
In 1968 she landed a job as the “girl reporter,” as she described it, for the newly launched New York magazine. She soon would be a girl reporter no more, but a force in both journalism and feminism.
She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972. In her obituary for Steinem in the magazine, Executive Editor Kathy Spillar wrote:
Ms. put abortion, sexual harassment and domestic violence on its cover when mainstream publications barely had language for them. It explained and championed the Equal Rights Amendment, evaluated presidential candidates on issues affecting women, published a groundbreaking national study of date rape and documented the pressure advertisers exerted over editorial decisions. It brought feminist analysis to politics, work, health, family, sexuality, culture, race and economic power.
It also opened its pages to argument and disagreement. Feminism was never a finished doctrine to Steinem. It was a living, self-questioning movement—a method of seeing connections that established power would rather keep hidden.
Journalism and feminism were barely acquainted at that time. The March 16, 1970, issue of Newsweek led with “Women in Revolt” as the cover story. The day of publication, four-dozen women who worked there sued the magazine for sex discrimination. Women could research, but they had no path to become reporters. Of more than 50 reporters on staff, one was a woman, according to the women’s attorney, ACLU assistant legal director Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Two months later, 96 women at Time Inc. filed a sex discrimination complaint.
Lynn Povich wrote about the Newsweek experience in her 2012 book, “The Good Girls Revolt.”
The story in the New York Daily News, titled “Newshens Sue Newsweek for ‘Equal Rights,’ began, “Forty-six women on the staff of Newsweek magazine, most of them young and most of them pretty, announced today they were suing the magazine.”
Welcome to 1970. If this is your first visit, fasten your seat belts — now required. We have a long list of trigger warnings.
Journalism was hardly an outlier. According to Povich, “Until around 1970, women comprised fewer than 10 percent of students in medical school, 4 percent of law school students, and only 3 percent of business school students.”
Around the same time Steinem started her publishing career, my father was bringing me to his newsroom — a roomful of white men. (That is a retrospective observation. At 9, I was focused, wide-eyed, on the giant rolls of newsprint and the fact that the newspaper had its own gas pump.)
Fifty years later, my own newsroom looked a little different: more than half of the 100+ journalists in my department were women, from entry-level positions to senior management.
Self-congratulations are hardly in order; the list of indignities that women still endure is not short — and lately has been growing longer.
But Steinem remained focused on moving forward. In her New Yorker essay, she wrote:
People often ask me: What should we do? No one person could answer that for everyone. I will say that we must work together to make sure that equal laws and customs become normalized. While there are many external gestures, the biggest leaps are those that we make within ourselves. Standing up for your own full humanity is an example you can give to others. Bring equality into your workplace and home—and follow the sense you probably had as a child, before gender roles took shape, about fairness.
Steinem emphasized the importance of hope.
“Hope is a form of planning,” she said. “If you don’t imagine what could be, you’re already defeated. We need companions in hope because we are social animals. But hope is practical and necessary.”
The journey from girl in a bunny suit to American icon was an extraordinary one, and Gloria Steinem brought a lot of people along on that journey.
Ms.: On Gloria Steinem
New York Times: Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92
Washington Post: Gloria Steinem, lodestar of the modern women’s movement, dies at 92
New York Times: How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine Transformed the Publishing Industry
Gail Collins, New York Times: Gloria Steinem Knew How to Live
NPR: I don’t think I had $10 in the bank: Angela Davis remembers Gloria Steinem’s allyship
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