Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist journalist and social political activist. She became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and a co-founder of Ms.

About Gloria Steinem in brief

Summary Gloria SteinemGloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist journalist and social political activist. She became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and a co-founder of Ms. magazine. In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that works to make women visible and powerful in the media. As of May 2018, she traveled internationally as an organizer and lecturer, and was a media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of Ruth and Leo Steinem. Her mother was Presbyterian, mostly of German and some Scottish descent. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg, Germany, and Radziejów, Poland. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem,. was chairwoman of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. She graduated from Smith College, an institution with which she continues to remain engaged, from which she received her A. B. magna cum laude and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In the late 1950s, she spent two years in India as a Fellow at the Chester Bowles Asian Fellow, where she worked as a law clerk to Mehrajan Mahajan, Chief Justice of India.

In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine. After returning to the United States, she served as the director of the CIA’s Independent Research Service. She worked to send non-Communist students to the 1959 World Youth Festival in China. In 1957, she had an abortion, performed by Dr. John Sharpe, a British physician, when abortion was still illegal. Years later, she dedicated her memoir My Life on the Road to him. She wrote: “Dr. Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at an unknown home to seek an unknown fate, he said, ‘You must promise me two things: First, you will not tell anyone, at least, that you will do what you do with your life. Second, you want me to tell you that I want you to do what I want to do with my name. ‘“I want to help you.”” Steinem wrote in her memoir, “I Want to Help You Help Me Help You”.“”