Longtime second-wave feminist, writer, and co-founder of Ms. magazine Gloria Steinem, 92, passed away yesterday at her New York apartment. There was no cause of death given. The announcement of her death noted she was surrounded by many of the friends she had over the years.
It is hard to overstate just how important a figure she was. She started as a journalist, but she came of age in the 1950s, and with it were attitudes that said women couldn't do this or that, or, if they aspired to be writers, especially in the newspaper field, they were relegated to writing features, especially on the so-called "women's pages." During this time, she went "undercover" working as a Playboy bunny for a magazine called Show. The resulting article made her famous.
Steinem later co-founded New York magazine, which was the magazine that highlighted the premiere issue of Ms. Steinem, with several other women, founded the long-running magazine. Steinem also found time for activism on behalf of women's rights and wrote several books, one of which will be published later this month.
Ms. had its share of critics including some feminists who thought it didn't go far enough and from sexist jerks like broadcast journalist Harry Reasoner, who barely hid his contempt for the magazine. Ms. survived and continues to survive but for many years through a non-profit foundation.
Because Gloria Steinem in her younger days looked like a fashion model and worse yet, was articulate, she elicited a lot of hostility from people like Betty Friedan, who although a very good writer, wasn't photogenic and simply wasn't articulate. There was also a tale spread around by I think the Redstockings, a radical feminist group in its heyday of the late sixties and early seventies and still exists today, which made insinuations Gloria Steinem was somehow a tool of the CIA. In reality, early on she worked for an outfit that had some connections with the governmental organization, but she wasn't a spy or any of that other bullshit.
From Wikipedia:
In 1967, Steinem revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she worked full time from 1958 until 1962 at the Independent Research Service, which was largely financed by the CIA.[113] In May 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, published a report put together for the Independent Research Service by Steinem and others on the Vienna Youth Festival and its attendees.[114][115] Redstockings raised the question of whether Steinem had continuing ties with the CIA, which Steinem denied.[116] Steinem defended her relationship to the CIA, saying: "In my experience the agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."[76] Steinem also stated that she considered the CIA allies in promoting U.S. government policy against communism during the early Cold War.[117]
Redstockings was full of shit with its innuendo, but somehow in some quarters the fairytale Steinem was a spy is still being spewed. It doesn't even make sense. If she had ever been a spy or something nefarious, she would not have disclosed it in the first place. Redstockings were a bunch of paranoid idiots on this story. Undoubtedly, it was rooted in envy. Anyway, envy is a nasty character trait, and feminists weren't immune to it.
Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, the daughter of Leo and Ruth (Nuneviller) Steinem. Her free-spirited father, whom she adored, was a peripatetic antiques dealer, a big dreamer with no money.
“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,” Ms. Steinem told Time magazine in 1969.
...
When Gloria was about 10, her parents divorced, and her 19-year-old sister, Susanne, left for Smith College in Massachusetts. Gloria and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo where Ruth had once lived. Gloria’s life was consumed by caring for her mother, by then a meek and fearful woman who was addicted to sodium thiopental. She was “an invalid,” Ms. Steinem later wrote, “who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.”
Gloria shopped, prepared meals and tended to Ruth for seven years, until her senior year of high school, when they sold the house, saving the money for Gloria’s college tuition. Gloria spent her senior year living with her sister in Washington, D.C., while Ruth went to California, where she was cared for by her ex-husband.
While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.
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Unfortunately, the author resorts to some 1950s bullshit about how Gloria taking care of her mother somehow "colored" her views on marriage and children.
For fuck's sake, people have the right to live the lives they want without somebody second-guessing them.
On the other hand, I didn't know Gloria Steinem was mostly self-taught before going into college.
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