Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem

**David Bianculli** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bianculli. Gloria Steinem, the writer, activist and feminist icon died Wednesday in her New York City home. She was 92 years old.
Steinem was the voice and often the most identifiable face of women's liberation for more than half a century. She wrote a magazine article in 1963 called A Bunny's Tale for which she went undercover as a cotton-tailed cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article about the chauvinism and work conditions there caused a stir and set Gloria Steinem on a path towards both activism and publishing.
She was an early contributor to New York Magazine, where she wrote the political column, The City Politic. Within a decade in 1971, she and fellow feminists gathered to launch another publication, Ms. Magazine, the first glossy national magazine to be created, owned and operated by women and targeted at increasingly self-aware women of the 70s. It proved widely popular and hugely influential. And so did, over the decades, Gloria Steinem. Politically, she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus, along with Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and others, to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and encourage more women to run for public office. And she continued to write essays, articles, books, and was quoted as saying, Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. She wrote nearly a dozen non-fiction books.
Today, we're going to remember Gloria Steinem by listening back to some of her conversations with Terry Gross. The first is from 1987 At that time, Steinem was celebrating the 15th anniversary of the publication of Ms Magazine.

**Terry Gross** (1:51)
Gloria Steinem, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Gloria Steinem** (1:53)
Thank you.

**Terry Gross** (1:54)
You had already worked in for several magazines as a journalist. Why did you think it was important to have a magazine written by and devoted to women?

**Gloria Steinem** (2:04)
Well, first because even before I began to think about anything that might be called feminism or to question the structures that women encountered, I and lots of women could not write about political subjects for the existing magazines. We were thought to be the experts on food, makeup, babies and celebrities, but that was pretty much it. And though I railed against it as many other women did, perhaps not hard enough in retrospect, but at least we tried, it really didn't budge very much. Then after we began to realize that there was a reason why women felt connected to other discriminated against groups and kind of identified with the underdog, because we were also underdogs and there began to be a women's movement.
Then the magazine said, well, you know, we published our article on feminism last year, or if we're going to write one article saying that women are full human beings, we'll have to publish one right next to it saying they're not in order to be objective. So it became more and more clear to lots of us that we could not either write what we wanted to or read or edit what we wanted to in the existing magazine. So we started to meet and discuss whether or not a magazine might be possible.

**Terry Gross** (3:23)
Did you find too that a lot of male editors thought that it was just too specialized, too narrow to write about issues like abortion or equality for women? Because all of their readers wouldn't be interested in it.

**Gloria Steinem** (3:34)
No, absolutely. That was true on the left and on the right. You would find, I'm sorry to say, is because I have much more affection for the left, but you would find left men editors who would say, well, abortion is too controversial and we can't divide the left, quote unquote, with this kind of argument. Of course, it was actually much more popular as an issue than anything they were talking about, but still, it just wasn't serious in their view.
I mean, when I think about the life of the magazine, I think partly about the fact that everybody said after the first issue, well, they've said everything they have to say, what is there to talk about besides child care and welfare is a woman's issue and a few other things, but that's it, now what? I mean, so actually, the movement and the magazine has been being pronounced over ever since the... Well, actually, the first story that I know of, the cover story pronouncing the women's movement over was from 1969 before the magazine ever started.

**Terry Gross** (4:38)
Well, that was pretty premature.

**Gloria Steinem** (4:41)
Right.

**Terry Gross** (4:42)
What did you think the state of feminist coverage was in the mainstream media in the early 70s and late 60s?