Gloria Steinem

By Tom Kirvan

Writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer.

Gloria Steinem has been all those things and more during a career that took flight on July 1, 1972 when the first edition of Ms. hit the newsstands.

As the co-founder of the magazine with Dorothy Pittman Hughes, Steinem vowed to translate “a movement into a magazine” as she helped launch the publication that sold out all 300,000 copies that were printed in the span of eight days. The magazine tackled issues like economic inequality, reproductive rights, and the importance of political activism, overcoming stinging criticism from conservatives in the media and in political circles. Syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick was one of the magazine’s harshest critics, labeling it a “C-sharp on an un-tuned piano” with an air of “petulance, bitchiness, or nervous fingernails screeching across a blackboard.” Television news anchor Harry Reasoner predicted, “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say,” a comment that undoubtedly still echoes in the offices of the now quarterly publication that will mark its 53rd anniversary this year.

Gloria Steinem*

Steinem, who served as an editor of the magazine for its first 15 years, was no stranger to the world of publishing, founding New York magazine in 1968. A prolific writer, Steinem has received a host of honors in the world of journalism, including the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations. She also is a best-selling author, penning such works as “My Life on the Road,” “Moving Beyond Words,” and “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.” In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, prompting the Smith College alumna to say, “Go too far, or you’re not going far enough.”

Other gems from the 91-year-old Steinem:

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
“Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.”
“We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.”
“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”
“America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”

*Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons