In a patriarchal social system, Women have been fighting for women’s rights as the male-dominated power is underpinned in every structure, say, political system or corporate. Every time, everyone next tries to clamp-down women’s voices to keep them unheard so that they remain “powerful.”
When the depression was touching heights, at that time an extraordinary girl took birth on 25 0f March 1934, who grew up and became “mother of feminism’’ – Gloria Steinem, there is no name in the list of forefront women’s right campaigner as much as her name hits from the last 55 years and more to go.
EARLY LIFE
Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the second child and daughter of Leo and Ruth Steinem. Steinem had an unusual bringing, spent early years traveling with her parents in a house trailer. her father worked as a traveling antique salesman and didn’t get the school on a regular basis until she was 11 years old. Around the same time, Steinem’s parents got divorced and she ended up caring for her mother, Ruth, who suffered from mental illness (Depression.)
Steinem spent six years living with her mother in Toledo before leaving for college. At Smith College, she studied government, a non-traditional option for women of that time. It was evident from her early days that she did not want to follow the all common life path as women in those days—marriage and motherhood. “In the 1950s, once you married you became what your husband says, so it seemed like the last choice you’d ever have…I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child—my mother. I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else,” she later told People magazine.
PERSONAL LIFE
In the year 2000, A woman with the saying “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” got married at the age of 66 to David Bale, who was an animal right activist and environmentalist and this union marked her as an incredibly unpredictable but destiny had other plans, this union didn’t last long. Bale lost his life due to brain cancer in 2003. “He had the greatest heart of anyone I’ve known,” Steinem told O magazine.
ABOUT WORK
Gloria Steinem is a social activist, writer, lecturer, and journalist, aged 82 with a cool, calm, witty voice and still twinkling with no sign of stepping back from her splendid Feminism movement. After finishing her degree in 1956, she received a fellowship to study in India then started her career as a journalist in New York, started writing freelance write-ups for different publications. Her early articles used to be based on women’s issues and for this, she faced a backlash from many.
Undeterred, Steinem kept it flowing, exploring social and political domains than in 1963 when Show magazine hired her and that point, she was able to steal national attention but apart from this, there was nothing for her to get satiate from Playboy bunny role, after a gap of few years, she got a chance to become an editor and a political writer with the New York magazine. Throughout the 1960s, Steinem was seen committed to women’s rights, world peace, and racial injustice and further also committed to Civil rights movements and anti-war protests.
She has been the one who is responsible for adding light to the concept of feminism. She has also raised her voice against domestic violence and drew other’s immediate attention towards it. The truth is that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it,” Steinem told the New York Daily News.
BOOKS AND MOVIES
Gloria Steinem drew first attention for “A Bunny’s Tale” (1963), an exposé of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club published in Show magazine. In 1968, she began writing a political column, “The City Politic,” for New York magazine. In 1972, Steinem left everyone amazed by Ms., the first nationally circulated women’s magazine to bring feminism into the mainstream.
Later, In 2005, she even made her appearance in the movie ‘’I had an abortion’’, adding spark in her role of a feminist, she has also been a part of the global #Metoo movement. Being an award-winning and prolific writer, she has written several books including a biography of ‘Marilyn Monroe’ and best-selling ‘My Life On The Road.’
