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I met her at Bioneers in, what, 2010?
She was beautiful in and out, powerful, fierce, funny, wise, imperfect, heroic in service to bending the arc of history toward justice, ahead of her time, loving, someone who worked to create community and listening and women’s community specifically.
A pioneering journalist, “she first shocked the nation with her 1963 undercover exposé exposing the exploitative labor conditions at the New York Playboy Club.”
Founder of Ms., which was in its time a groundbreaking magazine in an era long before social media, when a single magazine could change the world. And it did. She pushed ERA, equality for women. She spent the 1960s “campaigning so women could eventually apply for credit cards without a man’s signature, be admitted to Ivy League universities that previously barred them, and legally get an abortion.”
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off” Gloria Steinem
“By 1971, she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to push women into elected government offices, and launched Ms. magazine, the first national publication entirely owned and operated by women to address taboo issues like domestic abuse and bodily autonomy.
Over the course of her career, she also co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, Ms. Foundation for Women —
which launched the groundbreaking Take Our Daughters to Work Day — Voters for Choice, Choice USA, and Women’s Media Center, building institutions dedicated to women’s political power, reproductive freedom and representation in media.
Internationally, she co-founded the Free to Be Foundation and helped found Equality Now, Donor Direct Action, and Direct Impact Africa.
For nearly six decades, she fought for reproductive freedom, the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay, workplace equality, and women’s political representation, while insisting that gender equality was inseparable from racial and economic justice.”
“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person”
Hillary Clinton: “She was one of the architects of the entire structure of women’s equality. Tearing down those obstacles to young women being able to participate where their talents and hard work took them.”
her latest memoir, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled for release later this month.
“She helped push women’s right forward for generation. Her impact on women’s life in the [West] is hard to overstate.” ~ a comment
“Lived long enough to see women’s rights start to be eroded by Republicans.”
“Indeed- what a dispiriting time to have departed. Living long enough to see many woman gladly revert and relinquish their freedoms and aid the administration in the process of erosion of many fundamental rights of women. Perhaps it’s a blessing she will not see what else may follow.” ~ comments
Re her CIA funding early on: “Less cloak-and-dagger and more a young, energetic, global representative for American values and freedom, Steinem leveraged her underwriting to attend international youth festivals organized and otherwise ideologically dominated by America’s adversaries.
“Long before the formalized concept of soft power, Steinem personified and promoted abroad the vigor and progressive nature of the U.S. youth movement.
“The author of nine books, she campaigned against domestic violence, female genital mutilation, the pornography industry and the Vietnam and Gulf wars. She also worked in support of causes including Black Lives Matter, the reunification of Korea, female reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights and the Times Up movement. In 1984, she was arrested while protesting against apartheid outside the South African embassy in Washington DC.”
“I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right,” she told the Observer in 2011. “Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive.”
She also credited black feminists including Florynce Kennedy, Evelyn Cunningham, Shirley Chisholm and Fannie Lou Hamer for teaching her the importance of activism. “It was like finding a family,” she said of that time. “As wildly different as we may be, and we certainly were, women share hopes and a certain vision of the world, and a certain shit detector.”
This also began Steinem’s career as a provocative journalist, penning articles including If Men Could Menstruate, which ran in Ms, a magazine co-founded by Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 1971.
“Strange as it may seem, Steinem’s personal views and CIA political goals aligned. Her brand of social revolution, promoted by American tax dollars, was meant to counter Soviet-sponsored revolutionary messaging. Public funds were intended to slow the Soviet scourge while showing America’s alternative democratic face.”
“I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned.”
“…she toured and collaborated with black feminist voices like Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Flo Kennedy, both who discussed intersectionality concepts before the term was coined.”
“She was literally the treasurer for the legal defense fund for Angela Davis, and marched with UFW. For a white woman in the 60s she was pretty damn on the leading edge of the social justice cause! Like these comments have got to be some kind of anti-feminist spam happening.”
Highly recommend her AD apartment tour:
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