Gloria Steinem Deserves Praise but Maybe Not Worship

Gloria Steinem, a towering figure in the feminist movement and a cultural icon who worked for decades to win more rights, protections and opportunities for women, died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at 92. Steinem also earned her fair share of criticism over the decades, most notably for her defense of Bill Clinton’s treatment of Monica Lewinsky, her time working for the CIA and her positions on sex workers’ rights. 

In its obituary for her, The Guardian noted:

Steinem, unlike some of her contemporaries, never recanted or modified her many causes, which included civil rights, violence against women, and the struggle for equality. She continued to argue that every economics course ought to start not with production but with reproduction, and an understanding of the patriarchal instinct to restrict a woman’s right to contraception and abortion.

Kathy Spillar, executive editor of Ms., which Steinem co-founded, wrote:

She insisted that feminism’s history include the Black women, labor organizers, Indigenous women, lesbians, civil rights leaders and community activists whose work had too often been erased. She frequently credited women such as Florynce Kennedy, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pauli Murray and Shirley Chisholm with teaching and inspiring her. When the media attempted to anoint her the leader of a leaderless movement, she redirected attention toward the organizers, coalitions and collective action that made change possible.

After launching her career as a journalist with an expose of working conditions at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club, Steinem dedicated herself to expanding women’s rights after attending a meeting where women spoke about their abortion experiences. As The New York Times wrote of the moment:

She was jolted into feminism that year when she reported on a group of women in Greenwich Village discussing their illegal abortions. Angered that they had been made to feel like criminals, Ms. Steinem, who had had a secret abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first openly feminist essay, titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”

At that moment, she viewed herself as part of something bigger than herself. “It was the big click,” she said in “Gloria: In Her Own Words,” a 2011 HBO documentary. “It transformed me.”

Ms. was an immediate success upon its launch in 1971, selling out its first issue in eight days. According to The New York Times: 

The magazine attracted prominent writers, including Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Vivian Gornick. It covered a range of topics, including sisterhood, gender-neutral child rearing, battered wives and maternity leave. It rated political candidates by their stands on issues that were important to women.

For a time, Ms. thrived. But the expanding women’s movement — never a monolith — splintered into factions and faced backlashes (see the divisive feminist sex wars over pornography in the 1980s). Schisms divided the magazine, too. Anger was often directed at Ms. Steinem, whom some saw as a fence-sitter, trying to please everyone. More radical women and some women of color found the magazine wishy-washy and not inclusive enough, and they broke away.

Steinem leaves a feminist movement riven by factions and disagreements that faces major challenges to the women’s health victories she participated in decades ago, such as the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Nor has the wider struggle for equality been won. Women still make $.81 to a man’s $1; Black women have a maternal mortality rate more than three times higher than white women; and the U.S. continues to have the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country. Some conservatives have even started talking about repealing the 19th amendment. The rise of fascism and right-wing political movements globally threatens economic and social progress for women everywhere.  

In an article for The New Yorker published on Sept. 3, Steinem reflected on her own life, her work and on what can come next. “We have seen leaps of progress already,” she wrote, 

thanks to the millions of women and girls — and many men and boys, too — who have stood up for equality. Because of this movement, most people in the world have now seen women who are astronauts, union organizers and farmers, liberators and peacemakers. Thanks to women who gathered to tell the truth at the kitchen table or village well, who acted in local elections or at the United Nations, feminism — or any other word for human equality — is widely recognized as a precondition of democracy, economic development, spirituality, and peace.

Spillar, Ms.’ executive editor, closed her remembrance with a call to arms. “The most important monument to Gloria will not be a statue, an award or even a shelf of remarkable books,” she wrote, 

It will be the work we — working together — do next. It will be every person who organizes instead of surrendering to isolation. Every journalist who asks whose voice is missing. Every reader who supports independent media. Every young person who discovers that an injustice bearing down on their life is neither natural nor inevitable. That’s how the circle grows wider.

Watch Steinem’s speech to the National Women’s March in January of 2017 here, and see early clips of her here and here.