Over the course of her long and influential life, Gloria Steinem went from being described in the pages of TIME as “one of the best dates to take to a New York party these days” and “smashing looking Gucci liberal” to being lauded as a “feminist icon.” If nothing else, the shift in the tone of her coverage in the magazine provides a window into the change in attitudes toward women that she helped engineer over the course of her 92-year life, which ended on Sept. 2.
Let’s add one more description to the list: durable dynamo. Steinem never outlived her ability to be relevant, inspiring several generations of women to organize and strive to be given the same opportunities as men. She never stopped blazing a trail for those who faced a particularly dense thicket and she never thought small. “I believe that things are a circle, not a hierarchy,” she said to TIME in 2011. “The kind of society we are striving toward is one in which things are linked not ranked. And one in which we understand that the women’s movement and the anti racist movement and the gay movement and the environmentalist movement, they’re all linked.”
Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, to a homemaker mother and a father with, she later said, only two points of pride: “He never wore a hat, and he never had a job. He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink.” She didn’t spend a full year in school until she was 12, when her parents split and she ended up living with her mother, whose mental health was in a dire state, in East Toledo, Ohio. At 16, she was sent to live with an aunt in Washington. Before that, she says, “I’d never lived any place to invite anybody home to. I thought that people always ate out of refrigerators.”
After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she spent two years in India on a fellowship (and also to get out of an engagement), then came home to work in Cambridge, Mass., for a group encouraging American students to attend Communist youth festivals abroad. It was later revealed to be CIA-funded, but Steinem was unfussed, saying she “was happy to use the Establishment’s money against the Establishment.”
In 1963, she famously published a first-person account of her glamour-free month undercover as a Playboy Bunny in Show magazine. It was her big break, and it also threatened to be her curse, since at first she almost exclusively got offered assignments along the same lines. This was the period when TIME thought it important to note an appearance in which she wore “a Luis Estevez creation that consisted of five widely spaced bands of chinchilla held together by transparent black net. In between was supposed to be little more than a bare bodkin.”
She later got hired at the fledgling New York magazine, where in 1968 her first story was about Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s stint as a New York City waiter and laundryman. As she steadily found her journalistic feet, she began to find her calling: to use her charm, wit and platform to promote equality. Steinem understood the fear that these ideas stirred up in people. “Women don’t want to exchange places with men,” she wrote in an essay for TIME in 1970, shortly after the magazine identified her as “a trim, undeniably female, blonde-streaked brunette who has been described as ‘the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton.’ ” She went on to add: “But we do want to change the economic system to one more based on merit. In Women’s Lib Utopia, there will be free access to good jobs—and decent pay for the bad ones women have been performing all along, including housework.”
Inevitably, her activism moved beyond writing to organizing. In 1971, along with Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and several others, she convened the National Women’s Political Caucus to try to get more women into government offices. Shortly after that she co-founded Ms. magazine, which she described as “a how-to magazine; not how to make jelly but how to seize control of your life.” TIME’s writers, by this time calling her “feminism’s superstar,” finally began to acknowledge her impact. A story about the 1972 Democratic convention—titled, alas, “Eve’s Operatives”—opened with: “Gazing around the convention through her blue-tinted glasses, Gloria Steinem pronounced with satisfaction: ‘We’ve changed the population here. It almost looks like the country. What she meant was that women are 52% of the nation’s population, and last week close to 40% of the convention delegates were women—a dramatic jump over their 13% representation at the 1968 Democratic Convention.”
There was a still way to go, however—both for women and for TIME. “Decorative as the women were in their bell-bottom trousers, miniskirts, jeans and hot pants,” the magazine went on to say, “they were not there to be on display but to seek power. Except for a couple of setbacks, they got enough to satisfy and even surprise them.” After the crushing loss of Democratic Presidential Candidate George McGovern to Richard Nixon, Steinem’s political campaigning took a backseat to her advocacy work. The 1977 women’s conference, which she has called “the most important event that nobody knows about,” remained one of her proudest achievements, even as it sparked a conservative backlash and perhaps the founding of the religious right.
As the decades passed, Steinem’s activism grew to encompass more than women’s equality. She campaigned on behalf of native people, was arrested while protesting apartheid, publicly opposed the first Gulf War, advocated for disarmament in Korea, spoke against child abuse, female genital mutilation and pornography, and was an early supporter of LGB rights. (It took her a little longer to endorse the transgender movement.) Her advocacy was always couched in pragmatism and compassion. She pointed out that the pedestal women were put on was “as much a prison as any small, confined space” and called her 2019 memoir The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! Writing, her first calling, remained one of her great loves—”the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” She published books throughout her career, many of which, including her first memoir, 1983’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, were bestsellers; her latest, An Unexpected Life, is due out this fall. (She often joked that she wished her books didn’t get republished so much because it would mean they were no longer relevant.)
By the ’90s, Steinem had scored a TIME cover, albeit one about a pushback against feminism, after her book about female self esteem—Revolution From Within—was a bestseller. “As she tours shopping malls, Steinem is being mobbed by crowds that, according to one bookstore owner, exceed those of Oliver North and Vanna White, the backlash icons of American manhood and womanhood,” Nancy Gibbs wrote. As well as writing her own books, Steinem contributed to countless others, appeared in more than 120 films, help produce several documentaries and inspired the 2019 Off Broadway play, Gloria: A Life. She cast her gaze domestically, locally, nationally and globally, founding Equality Now, which aimed to elevate and protect the rights of girls and women internationally.
Somewhere around the turn of the century, the times—and TIME— caught up with Steinem; her ideas became mainstream and her words and activities were covered with the kind of reverence reserved for icons. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Half a century after writing her Women’s Lib Utopia essay for TIME, she annotated it, warning that women had made many advances but that the “time of greatest danger comes after a victory, and that’s where we are now.” (She also noted that she found out later that she had been paid less than the men who wrote for the same issue.)
Through it all she kept one of her less acknowledged gifts intact: her sense of humor. She did not come up with the classic feminist saying that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, but she popularized it. She was always threatening to get a back tattoo for her 70th birthday. So frequently was she asked about her beauty secret that she came up with the perfect reply: “Revolution,” she would say. “It keeps you young.”
In 2011, TIME asked what she would do if she only had two years to live. “It seems to me one of the uses of age is to help you know what you want to do and keep from wasting time,” she said. “And I have this unfortunate notion that I’m immortal, which doesn’t cause you to plan very well. I think it would be mainly about writing and seeing friends, my chosen family. And writing what I believe. And maybe living with elephants. I do still want to live with elephants.”
