Journalist Gloria Steinem, a benchmark of feminism, dies

BarcelonaIn the 60s, the feminist revolution wore aviator glasses and long hair with a center part. This was the iconic image of American journalist Gloria Steinem, who died this Wednesday at the age of 92 in New York. A feminist icon and inspiration for women in the United States and around the world, she never abandoned the fight as an activist. "Gloria's greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make them feel seen and heard. Her words, her actions, and her example gave people permission to show themselves as they truly are. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor," her foundation remarked in the statement announcing her passing.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, she has been an essential figure in the women's rights movement within the so-called second-wave feminism. Her parents separated when she was 11 years old and from that moment on she lived with her mother, whom she had to take care of when she had a nervous breakdown and suffered from depression. Many years later, Steinem explained that her mother's experience was essential for her to begin to understand the social and political inequality between men and women. She was educated at Smith College in Massachusetts, and began her career as a journalist in the early 60s, when the editor of the magazine Esquire commissioned her an article on contraception and contraceptive methods. The piece was a work that highlighted how women were forced to choose between motherhood and a professional career. During that same period she also worked for the magazine Help!, a publication for which she posed as a Playboy bunny to investigate what the working conditions were like for women working at the Playboy Club.

The article After black power, women's liberation (After black power, women's liberation), published in 1969, made her a leader of the feminist movement and one of the visible faces of the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. However, she herself had explained that she considered that her life as a feminist activist had not begun until a year later, when she attended a demonstration in favor of abortion rights at a church in New York. Steinem had an abortion when she was 22 years old, in 1957, in London, when it was still illegal. "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament," she stated to the Guardian in 2015, in the midst of a conservative wave that was calling for the suppression of this right.

Her feminist consciousness and practice led her to create the magazine Ms. in 1972, a publication created by women and for women. One of Steinem's goals was for the magazine to address the issues that really concerned its readers and to leave aside topics like fashion and housekeeping, which until then were the dominant themes in publications aimed at a female audience. "As a journalist, I realized that there was no publication for women that was controlled by women, and that made me, together with many colleagues, start the magazine Ms.", explained Steinem. Among these colleagues were Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Mary Peacock, and Margaret Sloan-Hunter.

One of the most remembered and groundbreaking issues of Ms. was the one that included a campaign to call for the legalization of abortion, in which some of the most famous women in the United States participated. With the title "We have had abortions", more than 50 well-known names shared their stories about abortion when the procedure was illegal in most of the country's states. In the early days of its history, the magazine faced criticism, boycotts, and difficulties in securing advertising. Even so, the publication survived, and Steinem asserted that when she re-read the first issue, she realized that "it was really good". The journalist was the editor of the magazine for fifteen years, which in 2001 was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Among Steinem's books, Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions (1983), the essay Marilyn: Norma Jean (1988), about the actress Marilyn Monroe, and Revolution from whithin (1992) stand out. In 2015, Steinem published her memoirs My life on the road, which La Segona Perifèria will publish next year, for the first time in Catalan, with a translation by Ariadna Pous. The book, which the journalist dedicated to the doctor who performed her abortion in London even though it was an illegal practice at the time, is the account of the decades that Gloria Steinem spent traveling through the United States, talking with people of all kinds and participating in social movements.

The foundational years of Ms. magazine are part of the context of the series Mrs. America, in which the role of Gloria Steinem was played by actress Rose Byrne. As the iconic figure she was, Steinem's life was also brought to the cinema: Julie Taymor released The Glorias in 2020, which reviewed her biography and in which different actresses, such as Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander, played the journalist.

Steinem never had children and married after 60, after years of being very critical of the idea of marriage. "I hope this [the wedding] proves what we feminists have always said: that feminism is about the ability to choose what is right at each moment of our lives," said the journalist in the statement she made on the occasion of her wedding in 2000 to businessman David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale. They were only married for three years, as in 2003 Bale died due to a brain lymphoma.