Gloria Steinem

From Philosopedia

Steinem, Gloria (25 March 1936– )

Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio. When she was 10, her father abandoned the family, leaving her alone to care for her mother, who was dysfunctional from depression. Young Gloria went to school as possible, tap-danced in talent contests, and mothered her severely ill mother. The difficulty of her struggles was poignantly revealed in an anecdote in later memoirs, of how she waited until all the dishes were dirty, then washed them in the bathtub.

Escaping into books and the movies, Gloria was popular with classmates and managed to do well in school. In 1951, she was finally rescued when her older sister invited her to move to Washington, D.C. and complete her high school education. Steinem was accepted by Smith, where she first started to write, and graduated magna cum laude in 1956.

The recipient of a two-year grant to India, she discovered that she was pregnant. During a stopover in England en route to India and facing a desperate crossroads, Steinem managed to arrange an abortion. She was later on the vanguard calling for legalized abortion.

Steinem moved in 1960 to New York City to start a journalism career, where she was met with sexist roadblocks, such as the Life editor who told her: "We don't want a pretty girl. We want a writer." The glamorous writer freelanced herself into New York celebrityhood, working for such venues as the TV news satire, "That Was the Week That Was." But it took her years to be given the political assignments she craved.

In 1969, Steinem wrote her first feminist article. Throughout the next five heady years, she stumped for feminism around the country, becoming the women's movement's best-known, most quotable exponent. She helped found Ms. in 1971, convinced that freedom would come through "individual women telling the truth." Feminism she defined as "the belief that women are full human beings." In 1972, McCall's named her "Woman of the Year."

She was instrumental in calling the National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977, a landmark gathering. In 1983, her first collection of essays and articles was published, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. She also wrote Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986), a biography of Marilyn Monroe, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992), and Moving Beyond Words (1997).

An ideas-generator and original thinker, Steinem remains one of feminism's most elegant, loyal and thoughtful advocates, one who wrote,

• We are discovering, with the very helpful tutelage of the religious right, the ways in which organized religion is very often politics made sacred. Religion decrees the proper structure here on Earth by placing it in heaven, so to speak, and sanctifying it.…It’s an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous
• By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.

When Pope John Paul II visited New York City in 1995, Steinem told a crowd, including humanist activists Dennis Middlebrooks and Warren Allen Smith,

• We will live to see the day that St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a child-care center and the Pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.

{HNS2; The Humanist, July-August 1998; TYD}