Gloria Steinem Brought Women Together to Change the World

In the beginning, there was the famous story about the young journalist Gloria Steinem, going undercover in 1963 as a Playboy Bunny, all décolletage and rabbit ears, in order to expose a culture of degradation and misogyny. The Bunny episode is certainly the Steinem anecdote most often cited, but it’s such an early story that it’s just a canary, really, hinting only a little at what would become a lifelong commitment to feminism. Steinem, who died Sept. 2 in her home in New York City at the age of 92, was an icon of second-wave feminism. As one of the co-founders, in 1971, of both Ms. magazine and, along with many other feminists, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Steinem advocated fiercely and vocally on behalf of women’s rights. She was also involved in the fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. But she didn’t consider her life as an “active feminist” to have started until 1969, when in her mid-30s she attended an abortion speak-out in a church basement. Steinem was there as a reporter for New York magazine, but found herself struck by the stories the women told, and the truths that they were willing to reveal in front of other people. She had her own truth, wh...