The American journalist, writer and activist Gloria Steinem (Toledo, Ohio, United States, 1934), one of the great promoters of modern feminism, died this Wednesday at the age of 92 at her home in New York. Steinem is a key player in the second wave of the feminist movement, a tireless defender of civil and reproductive rights and an enormous example for several generations of women since the late 1960s. After a long, passionate and committed life, she died peacefully and “surrounded by many of her loved ones” in her residence on New York's Upper East Side, according to what her official Instagram account published this Thursday.
“Her almost one hundred years of life were full, and she continued to fight for equality until the end,” details the message of her death, which highlights that the greatest gift of Steinem, a legend of the feminist revolution who raised debates never before addressed and broke down enormous barriers to make life easier for other women, was “her ability to listen to others and make them feel seen and heard.”
Steinem spent much of her life fighting for women's rights, a fight she seasoned with fine humor. “Laughter is the only free emotion,” the activist and journalist used to say, who defended, like other great clairvoyant feminists, that humor is key to pushing feminist advances and that the movement will not advance at the pace it needs if men are not also involved. She didn't want to have children. “Not for a millisecond,” he responded in an interview when asked if he had ever regretted not having children.
"When people ask me how I keep hope and energy after so many years, I always answer the same thing: because I travel. For more than 40 years, I have spent half my time on the road," she said about her eminently nomadic career in the introduction to her joyful autobiography My Life on the Road, published in Alpha Decay in 2016. The great feminist reference appears on the cover of that book with her iconic loose blonde hair parted in the middle, one of his hallmarks along with his unforgettable tinted aviator glasses. According to his official Instagram account, he was preparing a new volume of his memoirs, titled An Unexpected Life, which will be published at the end of September. It will be the last of his ten long non-fiction works. Steinem also decided to give up his apartment in New York as a center for movements defending social justice.
The writer was born on March 25, 1934 and, due to her family's constant travels throughout the United States, she did not attend school regularly until she was 11 years old. In his memoirs he remembers those first trips. “As I leafed through old diaries and work calendars, abandoned letters and diaries, I was suddenly overcome by the memory of when my father was going through his tattered road maps and address books, thinking about how much money he would spend on gasoline to get from one place to another, where there were caravan parks that housed his wife and two daughters, and which roadside merchants could buy him the insignificant antiques that he sold and bartered as we traveled from end to end of the country,” he writes in My Life in the road. "I was very lucky to have a kind father who enjoyed my company. This allowed me to know that these types of men existed," she explained about her father, Leo Steinem, in an interview with this newspaper. Despite her nomadism, Gloria Steinem never got her driving license in a country, the United States, where she lives behind the wheel.
A firm defender of the rights of trans people, she graduated from the prestigious American university Smith College in studies on the functioning of governments, an unusual degree among women of the time. She worked as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization financed by the CIA. One of her great passions, however, was her work as a freelance journalist, in publications such as Esquire, where she focused mainly on issues that affected women. One of her most famous reports of that time, in Show magazine, was done by infiltrating herself as a Playboy bunny to denounce the conditions in which those young women were.
Steinem was one of the founders of New York Magazine in 1968. After covering an event on abortion, she invented the concept "freedom of reproduction", that is, the freedom of women to decide to have children or not to have them. In an essay she even recounted how she had undergone a clandestine abortion in the United Kingdom in 1957. “Our Vietnam,” she called it. Her feminist consciousness was born and grew, as happens in many cases, navigating from the personal to the political.
With other feminists such as Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, she created the National Women's Political Caucus and in 1971, together with the African-American activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes, founded the first feminist magazine, Ms., a shrewd and groundbreaking publication that challenged traditional women's magazines and addressed issues such as sexist violence, abortion and equal pay. "When we started, there wasn't even a word for sexual harassment. It was called life," Steinem herself said of Ms.'s early years. In 2013, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.
In an interview with EL PAÍS in 2016, she stated: "I was always aware that there was an imbalance and an injustice. But I thought I could overcome it individually. There was always a group of writers in New York who helped each other and advised each other on which editor could be more reasonable. But I did not realize that this could be changed until the women of the movement against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement - movements that our generation adored, but in which women were still mostly in a traditional role—they started to rebel against this and say: 'Wait a minute, we must have an autonomous movement for women.'”
In 2021 she received the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. The jury highlighted his decades-long activism “marked by independence and rigor, which has been the driving force of one of the great revolutions of contemporary society.”
