Gloria Steinem is being remembered as a feminist leader and icon. But the Chicagoans who interacted with her said she never made the movement about her—it was about all of us.
“She treated everyone like a peer,” said Illinois State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, who met Steinem several times, starting when Cassidy worked for the National Organization for Women’s (NOW) Chicago chapter in the early 1990s. “She took our work seriously. It was our work. [Talking with her] felt like a conversation with a colleague.”
Steinem, who died Wednesday at age 92 in her home in New York City, was the cofounder of Ms. magazine, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Free to Be Foundation and the Women’s Media Center. She was a longtime activist for women’s equality with NOW and other organizations, the author of several books (with one more, the memoir An Unexpected Life, scheduled for publication September 22) and numerous magazine and newspaper articles and an LGBTQ+ ally.
She began pushing for equality in the workplace, reproductive freedom and more at a time—the 1960s and ’70s—when sex discrimination and sexual harassment were common and largely accepted. Women usually couldn’t get bank loans without a male co-signer, and, until Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was illegal in most states. Her activism continued for the rest of her life, as barriers to equality for all remained. Among her many honors, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from President Barack Obama in 2013.
She was a frequent visitor to Chicago. Women & Children First hosted her for events in 1992, 1994, 1995 and 2015, the last one with Roxane Gay. She spoke at a 1980 rally in Grant Park to urge ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment—which Illinois didn’t ratify until 2018, and it has yet to become part of the U.S. Constitution. She gave a talk at Columbia College in 2012. She campaigned for congressional candidate Marie Newman in 2020, when Newman beat conservative Dan Lipinski in the Democratic primary for Illinois’ Third Congressional District and went on to win the general election.
Her appearances at Women & Children First always drew a large and enthusiastic audience. The bookstore’s owners and staff were enthusiastic too.
“The chance to see her and hear her in person felt like an enormous opportunity,” said Ann Christophersen, who founded the store with Linda Bubon in 1979; they owned it until 2014. The first time Steinem came to Women & Children First, people were lined up for several blocks down the street for a chance to see her, Christophersen said.
Steinem made sure that everyone could see her as well as hear her, no matter how large the crowd, Christophersen recalled. There’s a small platform at the back of the store for speakers, but Steinem would stand on a chair to assure that she was visible to all, she said.
“She was in the fight not for us but with us,” Christophersen added.
Steinem championed an inclusive feminism, both Cassidy and Christophersen said. That inclusion extended to working-class women, women of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. Betty Friedan, the cofounder of NOW, once claimed that the “lavender menace” of lesbians threatened the women’s movement (Friedan later recanted), but most sources say Steinem welcomed their presence. If she had reservations, they were apparently short-lived.
She fought against Anita Bryant’s campaign to repeal Miami-Dade County’s gay rights ordinance in 1977, although county voters ended up repealing it. Steinem once delivered the keynote address at the national conference of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. “Gloria made it clear that ‘the movement’ was as much about gay rights as it was about women’s rights,” attendee Alan Kravitz wrote in Jewish Women’s Archive in 2011.
“She stood with our community when it was neither safe nor popular to do so, naming plainly that feminists and LGBTQ+ people share the same struggle and the same opponents,” Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings said in an online statement.
Her relationship with transgender people was a bit more complicated. “Her early writings about transgender people caused real hurt and were rightly challenged,” Jennings said. “But she listened, reconsidered, and changed.”
Steinem maintained that these writings were misconstrued, although she admitted her understanding of trans people and their lives evolved over the years. Ms. published an excerpt from historian and travel writer Jan Morris’s memoir Conundrum In 1974, in which Morris, a trans woman, said she regretted nothing about her transition. But Steinem began to hear from gay men and lesbians who were not trans but were considering gender transition “not to align their bodies with their internal identities, but because of society’s bias against their sexual orientation,” she recalled in a 2013 column for The Advocate.
In 1977, Steinem wrote an essay “reminding us that, in addition to supporting informed choices like those of Jan Morris, Renee Richards, and others in the news at the time, we also needed to change society to fit individuals. It asked the question: If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?” she wrote in her Advocate piece.
As the 1977 essay circulated on the internet years later, some readers believed Steinem was anti-trans. Not so, she wrote in The Advocate: “I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make. And what I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.”
Christophersen said she wasn’t familiar with Steinem’s record on trans issues, but added, “She wasn’t a person who was above anybody, she wasn’t above making mistakes, she wasn’t above admitting an error.”
“The people that are willing to learn are the people who make the best leaders,” Cassidy said.
But again, Steinem held to the view that everyone could be a leader, Christophersen said: “She was out there fighting the fight that we all were fighting…she was one of the leaders, and she encouraged everybody to be leaders themselves in the women’s movement.”
Steinem’s foundation, known as Gloria’s Foundation, suggests that those who want to honor her consider donating to the foundation. The donations will help maintain Steinem’s home as a gathering place for activists as it was during her life, preserve her archives, and create programs to advance the movement for equality. The foundation’s website notes other organizations to support as well, including two LGBTQ+ nonprofits in Chicago, Center on Halsted and Howard Brown Health.
