Dreaming, After All, Is a Form of Planning: Gloria Steinem, 1934-2026

I suspect that, in politics, if you don’t leave a complicated legacy, you don’t leave a legacy. Even Jimmy Carter had issues, and Jimmy Carter spent the last decades of his life practically a living saint. Gloria Steinem was no Jimmy Carter. You can’t talk about Gloria Steinem without discussing racial issues, class issues, and trans issues. A lot of her statements about gay people from the ‘70s are deeply Freudian, and I wonder if she ever changed those stances but I kind of don’t wonder enough to go look it up. Even though that’s kind of my job.

Steinem was the granddaughter of Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, a feminist activist when the word “feminist” was still new. Her mother, Ruth Nuneviller Steinem, was severely mentally ill. She had what was described as a nervous breakdown before Steinem was born. Her parents ended up divorcing over it. Her mother could not hold a job—frankly, she sounds like a prime candidate for being on disability, regardless of gender—and her father didn’t make enough to provide for them, especially after the divorce. Steinem felt this was a demonstration of the importance of women’s being able to hold jobs, and how much the doctors ignored her mother didn’t help.

You can’t talk about feminism without talking about Gloria Steinem. It existed before her—see also her grandmother—but she was one of the voices that brought it screaming back in the ‘60s. The ‘50s had been spent pushing women into a box because the men returning from war needed their jobs back. Steinem was one of the women pushing for women to escape the box. After her famous investigative reporting at the Playboy Club, she found it hard to get work, because she was known for that one story.

Steinem’s brand of feminism was, alas, a very middle class cis het white version. It also tended to assume that everyone was, more or less, the same way she was. She decried pornography so strongly that she compared Larry Flynt to Hitler. Friends we will not be defending Flynt here, but that’s extreme. She said even that male-on-male pornography was based on misogyny, and that’s a lot. She conflated gender-affirming surgery with female genital mutilation, a position she didn’t publicly walk back on until 2013—at which point she said her statements had been misunderstood.

We could go on. Quite a bit. There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad to Steinem. Her defense of women’s reproductive rights is important and valuable; her failure at intersectionality is important to note. One of the things we here at Magpies naturally will note is her push to make DC give Wonder Woman her powers back instead of just making her a collection of stereotypes, but that doesn’t excuse her claiming that young women only supported Bernie Sanders to make boys like them. But of course, we must mention the weirdest thing about her, which is that she was married for three years to David Bale, until his death—which means she is survived by her stepson, Christian Bale.