09/04/2026
Gloria Steinem: The Woman Who Refused to Accept “That’s Just the Way Things Are”
Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio.
At the time, there was nothing about that little girl that suggested she would one day become one of the most recognizable voices in the American women’s movement.
Her childhood was complicated.
Her mother, Ruth, had worked as a newspaper journalist and was an intelligent, independent woman. But after Gloria was born, Ruth struggled with her health and spent much of her life dealing with depression and financial uncertainty.
When Gloria was 10, her parents separated. Her father left Ohio to look for work in California, while Gloria stayed behind with her mother.
Watching her mother struggle had a lasting effect on her.
Gloria saw what happened when a talented woman had very few choices. She saw how difficult it could be for a woman to support herself, build a career, and still be taken seriously by society.
Years later, Steinem would look back on her mother's life and recognize it as one of the roots of her feminism.
But before she became an activist, she became a journalist.
After graduating from Smith College in 1956, Steinem spent nearly two years in India. When she returned to the United States, she began building a career as a writer.
In the early 1960s, she was already writing about women's lives and the expectations placed on them.
Then came one assignment that changed the way people saw her.
In 1963, Steinem went undercover at a Pl***oy Club in New York, working as a Pl***oy Bunny. She later wrote about the experience in a two-part article called “A Bunny’s Tale.”
The story exposed the working conditions and treatment faced by the women who worked there.
But journalism alone wasn't enough for Steinem.
In 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out in Greenwich Village. Steinem had experienced an abortion herself in 1957, when she was 22 and abortion was still illegal in Britain.
That 1969 meeting became a turning point.
She began to see feminism not simply as something she could write about, but as something she had to fight for.
And she did.
In 1971, Steinem helped found the National Women's Political Caucus alongside women including Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan.
The goal was simple but ambitious: get more women involved in politics and help them gain actual political power.
Then came Ms. magazine.
In 1972, Steinem and a group of feminist writers and editors launched Ms. as a new kind of magazine — one that treated women's experiences as serious subjects rather than side stories.
The first issue began as an insert in New York magazine.
They printed 300,000 test copies.
They sold out in eight days.
Soon, thousands of women were writing to the magazine, telling their own stories and describing experiences that mainstream media had rarely taken seriously.
Ms. became much more than a magazine. It became a place where women could see their lives reflected in print.
Steinem also understood that feminism couldn't be separated from race.
She worked alongside Black activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and the two famously appeared together at speaking events, making a point that was important to Steinem: a movement for women's equality had to include women of different races and backgrounds.
Over the following decades, Steinem kept organizing, writing, speaking and campaigning.
She supported the Equal Rights Amendment. She fought for reproductive rights. She worked on issues involving violence against women, political representation and equality.
She didn't disappear when the headlines moved on.
In the 1990s, she helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day, encouraging girls to think about careers and possibilities beyond the traditional expectations placed on them.
In 2005, she joined Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan in founding the Women's Media Center, an organization focused on increasing women's visibility and influence in the media.
Steinem's career wasn't without controversy. Some of her decisions and political associations were criticized, including questions surrounding her earlier work connected to a CIA-funded organization. She also became a target of criticism from people who disagreed with her politics and approach to feminism.
But controversy never stopped her from working.
Even as she grew older, Steinem continued speaking publicly and supporting women's rights.
In 2015, she joined a group of women peace activists who traveled to North Korea and crossed the Korean Demilitarized Zone into South Korea.
By then, she had spent more than half a century in public life.
The little girl from Toledo had become a national figure.
But perhaps the most important part of Gloria Steinem's story isn't a single speech, article or organization.
It's the fact that she spent decades questioning things that other people simply accepted.
She had watched her mother struggle.
She had seen women treated differently because they were women.
And instead of deciding that this was simply how the world worked, she kept asking a much more uncomfortable question:
Why does it have to be this way?
That question became the foundation of her life's work.
And the impact of that work can be seen in millions of women who grew up with choices their mothers and grandmothers never had.
Gloria Steinem didn't change the world overnight.
She spent a lifetime pushing it, arguing with it, organizing against it — and refusing to accept that inequality was just the natural order of things.
Sometimes, that's how change actually happens.
One person sees something everyone else has learned to ignore…
and decides it doesn't have to stay that way.
