Gloria Steinem – Nostalgia Central

Gloria Marie Steinem was born on 25 March 1934, in Toledo, Ohio.

She grew up in a trailer home, and her mother, Ruth, spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill. Her parents eventually divorced under the strain of her mother’s illness.

Steinem graduated from Western High School in Washington DC in 1952 while living with her older sister Susanne Steinem Patch. She then attended Smith College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa (the oldest and most prestigious academic honour society in the United States) in 1956.

In the late 1950s, Steinem spent two years in India, where she was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi.

After returning to the United States, she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organisation secretly funded by the CIA that recruited American students to disrupt the Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki.

In 1960, Warren Publishing hired her as the first employee of Help! magazine. In 1963, she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny at New York’s Playboy Club for 11 days.

Her exposé lifted the lid on the sexist culture and harsh working conditions women endured there

In 1972, she co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and used her platform as a white, educated woman to speak out for those traditionally ignored – black people, ethnic minorities and the working class.

Sex and race were always intertwined, she argued in 1971, “because they are easy, and visible differences have been the primary ways of organising human beings into superior and inferior groups”.

A trailblazing activist for the feminist movement – and recognisable by her signature aviator glasses –  Steinem co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 to increase female participation in government.

She subsequently spent over six decades marching, organising, and writing to champion gender equality.

When Steinem turned 50, in 1984, a birthday gala was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Dinner was $250 a head – it was yet another fundraiser for her causes – and among Steinem’s friends in attendance were Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Betty Ford.

Two years later, Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in 1994, with the chronic pain condition trigeminal neuralgia.

In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, for her tireless fight for equal rights.

Gloria Steinem died at her home in New York City on 2 September 2026, at the age of 92.

“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”