09/04/2026
To understand the immense impact of Gloria Steinem -- the iconic leader of the women's movement, who died Wednesday at the age of 92 -- it helps to remember the world she started in. When she began, an American woman could not get a credit card or a bank loan without a man's signature. She could be turned away from the Ivy League for her s*x, paid less than the man at the next desk as a matter of course, and, in many states, legally r***d by her own husband. "When we started, there was not even a term for s*xual harassment," Gloria once said. "It was just called life." Over the next half-century, few people did more to change all of it than she did.
Gloria was an unlikely revolutionary. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, she grew up poor and often on the move, and by the age of 10 -- her parents divorced, her father gone -- she was largely caring for a mother whose mental illness had left her unable to care for herself. She escaped the poverty of her childhood during her senior year of high school, going to live with her older sister in Washington, D.C. From there she moved on: to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa; to a formative fellowship in India; and then to New York City, to become a writer.
She fought her way into journalism in an industry that wanted her to be decorative rather than serious, profiling celebrities and writing political columns while being handed "girl reporter" assignments and dismissed, in the words of one editor, as "a pretty girl" rather than a real writer. Her most famous early piece, a 1963 exposé for which she went undercover as a waitress at the Pl***oy Club, revealed the degrading conditions the women there endured -- though for years it only deepened the very typecasting she was fighting.
Her turning point came in 1969, in a Greenwich Village church. Assigned to cover a "speak-out" organized by the radical feminist group Redstockings -- where women stood up, one after another, to testify publicly about the illegal abortions they had undergone -- Gloria felt the personal and the political fuse. Here was the silence she had kept about her own life, spoken aloud, as politics. She would say she did not "begin my life as an active feminist" until that day. She called it "the big click." "It transformed me," she said.
The meeting cut so deep because of what she had carried alone for more than a decade. In 1957, at 22 and on her way to India, Gloria had just broken an engagement back home; a London doctor named John Sharpe agreed to refer her for an abortion, at a time when the procedure was still illegal in England and a decade before the law would change. He asked her to promise him two things. "First, you will not tell anyone my name," he told her. "Second, you will do what you want to do with your life."
She kept his secret for nearly 60 years, finally breaking it to dedicate a memoir to him: "I've done the best I could with my life. This book is for you." She never regretted the abortion, or feigned the guilt she was expected to feel. "I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life," she later said. "I wasn't going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life."
From that "big click" came nearly 60 years of movement building. In 1972, Gloria and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, along with a group of fellow feminists, co-founded Ms., the first national magazine created, owned, and run entirely by women -- a publication that treated abortion, domestic violence, and equal pay as the serious subjects they were, rather than offering readers new ways to please a husband. Its first standalone issue sold out its 300,000 copies in eight days.
Her organizing reached far beyond the page. In 1971, she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus alongside Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan, and in 1973 the Ms. Foundation for Women, one of the first national foundations devoted to funding women's causes. She opened some of the country's first r**e crisis centers and shelters for battered women.
Gloria gave the movement its language, too, coining the term "reproductive freedom" -- a phrase chosen deliberately because, as she put it, it "includes the freedom to have children or not to," broad enough to unite women who might otherwise be divided. If she was remembered for anything, Gloria once said, she hoped it would be that.
She did it all with a wit as sharp as her convictions. When a reporter told her she didn't look 40, she shot back, "This is what 40 looks like! We've been lying for so long, who would know?" She turned self-doubt into aphorism -- "Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it" -- and defiance into a rallying cry: "The truth will set you free, but first it will p**s you off." Told that a life without children was a tragedy, Gloria was unmoved. "Not everybody with a womb has to have a child," she said, "like not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer."
And she never once decided the work was done. Gloria lectured and wrote into her 90s; her final memoir, "An Unexpected Life," is due out later this month. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, undoing one of the central victories of her life, she did not despair so much as dig in.
"I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell," she said. "We are still dealing with the same issues." The pay gap persists, the Equal Rights Amendment is still not in the Constitution, no woman has been elected president, and the right to abortion she helped win has been taken from millions of women. The fight Gloria gave her life to is not finished. It has simply been handed on.
Passing it on is exactly what she meant to do. "At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I'm 'passing the torch,'" Gloria once wrote. "I explain that I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much -- and I'm using it to light the torches of others."
She spent more than half a century lighting them, by the millions. Gloria's light has not gone out. It's now in our hands.
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Gloria left one more story for us all. Her final memoir is being released this month: "An Unexpected Life," which traces her journey from a childhood of poverty to a lifetime leading the fight for equality, and ends with a final charge to the next generation at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593978177 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4qVFvFO (Amazon)
To share Gloria's story with a new generation, she also leaves behind a new picture book for young readers -- co-written with her friend Leymah Gbowee, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Liberian activist -- that tells both of their lives and calls on kids to build community and stand up to injustice: "Rise, Girl, Rise: Our Sister-Friend Journey. Together for All" for ages 5 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781338888942 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4qf2gmi (Amazon)
Her story is also told in the picture book "Gloria Takes A Stand: How Gloria Steinem Listened, Wrote, and Changed the World" for ages 6 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/gloria-takes-a-stand
For older kids, we recommend the illustrated biography "Who Is Gloria Steinem?" for ages 8 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/who-is-gloria-steinem) and the fascinating YA biography "Ms. Gloria Steinem: A Life" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/ms-gloria-steinem)
For adults who would like to learn more about Gloria Steinem's life, we also recommend her first autobiography "My Life On The Road" at https://www.amightygirl.com/my-life-on-the-road
For an excellent overview for kids of the fight for women's rights from the Suffrage Movement to modern times, we recommend "What Is The Women's Rights Movement?" for ages 8 to 12 at https://www.amightygirl.com/what-is-the-women-s-rights-movement
For many books for children and teens about the Women's Rights Movement, visit our "Women's Rights" section at https://amgrl.co/2DUnrm9
