Gloria Steinem: the revolution that also entered newsrooms

That of women is, probably, the great revolution of the last century. It did not take palaces, but it transformed daily life. The way of working, of loving, of having children or not having them, of relating to our body, to money and to power. We women of today walk on the shoulders of giants who debated what seemed indisputable and Gloria Steinem is one of them.

For a journalist, her story resonates particularly because Steinem was a journalist when female reporters were an exception in newsrooms and if they arrived there, they were reserved the topics considered feminine. In 1963 she infiltrated the Playboy Club in New York. She put on the rabbit ears, the body, the puff tail and the heels and worked for weeks like just another bunny. She wanted to know what was behind the apparent sexual sophistication and found low wages, controls over the workers' bodies, wardrobe and behavior, and harassment.

Feminism also needed a newsroom and she founded the magazine Ms. to decide what was news, how it was explained and from what perspective. She did not want to make a marginal publication for the converted, but rather to dispute the audience with the great women's magazines that taught women to be good wives and mothers, to be attractive and compliant.

Her feminism was written in the first person fulfilling the idea that "the personal is political". The body, marriage, motherhood, sex, money, self-esteem or who washes the dishes stopped being minor matters. Behind the everyday there was power.

Steinem preferred irony and satire over sermons. In 1978 she published the famous If men could menstruate: what would happen if it were men, and not women, who had their period? Menstruation, she imagined, would immediately become a symbol of virility. Men would boast about it, there would be competitions, rituals and, naturally, extraordinarily well-funded medical research to combat menstrual pain.

Steinem did not fit into the stereotype that opponents had manufactured of feminists. She was attractive, photogenic, fun, frequented sophisticated environments and had an extraordinary capacity for public seduction. She acted as a bridge and, above all, as a translator for any woman who had not read any feminist treatise.

For centuries men had explained women. She was part of the generation that decided that women would begin to explain themselves.