Before there was “that girl” on TikTok waking up at 5 a.m., drinking a green juice, journaling, going to Pilates, and somehow having her entire life together by 8:30, there were women fighting to have their voices heard at all.
One of those women was Gloria Steinem.
Long before women could turn feminism into a three-slide Instagram story, Steinem was writing about it, speaking about it, organizing around it, and, perhaps most importantly, making people uncomfortable enough to actually listen. She challenged the idea that women should be quiet, agreeable, pretty, and grateful for whatever opportunities they were given. Basically, she looked at the rules for women and decided she would rather question the entire rulebook.
And she did.
For more than half a century, Steinem used journalism and activism to challenge sexism in American society, becoming one of the most recognizable figures of the modern feminist movement. But her story is bigger than the famous glasses, the long hair, and the “feminist icon” label. Behind the image was a woman who understood that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say the thing everyone else has been told not to say.
Before “that girl” could inspire millions of women online to become the best versions of themselves, Gloria Steinem was part of a generation of women fighting to make sure women had the freedom to decide what that version of themselves could even look like.
So, Who Was Gloria Steinem?
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, Steinem did not exactly grow up in the world she would later spend her life challenging. Her parents separated when she was young, and her mother, Ruth, struggled financially and with mental illness. Watching her mother navigate a society that offered women very few paths toward independence would become important to Steinem’s understanding of women’s inequality.
After graduating from Smith College in 1956, Steinem spent two years traveling through India on a fellowship. When she returned to the United States, she began working as a journalist. Steinem entered journalism at a time when women were frequently pushed toward the “women’s pages,” the section of the newspaper where society apparently decided women needed to know about fashion, weddings, cooking, and how to keep their husbands happy.
Steinem wanted to write about politics. She wanted to write about social issues. She wanted to investigate the world around her. The problem was that the world of journalism wasn’t particularly interested in letting women investigate it. So Steinem did what she would eventually become very good at doing: she found another way in.
The Playboy Bunny Who Wasn’t Just There for the Bunny Ears
In 1963, Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club for a two-part investigation for Show magazine. Yes, Gloria Steinem was a Playboy Bunny. But not exactly for the reasons you might think.
She wasn’t there for the cocktails, the bunny costume, or whatever glamorous fantasy the Playboy Club wanted people to believe it represented. She was there as a journalist. What she found was a workplace where women were expected to maintain a particular appearance, follow strict rules, work for relatively low pay, and tolerate sexualized treatment from customers and management.
Steinem turned those experiences into “A Bunny’s Tale,” an investigation that exposed the reality behind the glamorous image. The story made her famous. But it also revealed something larger about being a woman in the media: sometimes society was willing to look at women without actually listening to them. Steinem wanted both. She wanted people to look at the problem and listen to what women were saying about it.
Feminism Wasn’t Just an Idea. It Was Personal.
Steinem’s activism became increasingly connected to issues that women were often expected to keep private. One of those issues was abortion. Steinem had an abortion in London when she was 22, at a time when abortion was largely illegal in the United States. Years later, she publicly discussed her experience at an abortion speak-out in New York.
That decision was significant because women were rarely encouraged to talk openly about abortion. The topic was surrounded by secrecy, shame and stigma. Steinem helped challenge that silence. And this became a recurring theme in her work: take something society tells women to hide and bring it into the conversation.
Women were experiencing domestic violence but were told it was a private family matter. Women experienced sexual harassment but were expected to laugh it off. Women were denied opportunities at work but were told they simply weren’t ambitious enough. Women were expected to sacrifice their careers for their families while somehow also being responsible for maintaining those families.
Steinem’s feminism asked a simple question: What if these aren’t individual women’s problems? What if the problem is the system itself?
Then Came Ms.
In the early 1970s, Steinem and a group of feminist journalists began creating a publication that would become Ms. magazine. The idea was pretty radical for its time: create a magazine that treated women’s experiences as serious subjects. The preview issue appeared in New York Magazine in 1971. It sold out quickly, and the first regular issue of Ms. was published in 1972.
The magazine discussed abortion, domestic violence, sexual harassment, reproductive rights, politics, employment discrimination, and other issues that mainstream publications frequently ignored. But Ms. did something even more important. It told women: You are allowed to care about these things.
Your career matters. Your body matters. Your safety matters. Your political opinions matter. Your experiences matter. You don’t need to make yourself smaller to make everyone else comfortable.
The Women Behind The Movement
It would be easy to tell Steinem’s story as though she single-handedly created modern feminism. She didn’t. And she never really claimed that she did.
Feminism was, and is, a movement created by countless women. Black feminists, working-class women, LGBTQ+ activists, civil rights leaders, labor organizers, reproductive rights activists, and women organizing within their own communities all played critical roles. Steinem herself worked alongside and learned from women, including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Shirley Chisholm, Florynce Kennedy, and many others.
This matters because one of the biggest criticisms of mainstream second-wave feminism was that the movement sometimes centered the experiences of white, middle-class women while failing to adequately represent women whose experiences were shaped by racism, poverty, sexuality, disability, and other forms of inequality.
That criticism is important. Because feminism cannot simply mean giving some women more opportunities while leaving other women behind. Steinem’s legacy is therefore not about pretending the feminist movement was perfect. It is about recognizing how much it changed, and understanding how much work remained.
From “Women’s Issues” to Everyone’s Issues
One of Steinem’s most important contributions was helping change the way Americans talked about women’s experiences. For decades, issues affecting women were often dismissed as “women’s issues,” as though they were somehow less important than the supposedly universal issues of politics, economics and society.
But here’s the thing: Women are society. Women are workers. Women are voters. Women are students. Women are doctors, lawyers, mothers, scientists, politicians, journalists, athletes, and literally every other category of human being. So why were women’s experiences treated like a separate topic?
Steinem challenged that distinction. If women were being paid less, that wasn’t just a women’s issue. If women were being sexually harassed at work, that wasn’t just a women’s issue. If women lacked political representation, that wasn’t just a women’s issue. If women couldn’t control their reproductive decisions, that wasn’t just a women’s issue.
They were societal issues. And by forcing those conversations into the mainstream, Steinem helped make feminism less of a niche political movement and more of a national conversation.
And Then Came the Backlash
Of course, not everyone was thrilled. Steinem became a target of criticism from conservatives, anti-feminists, and even other feminists. She was accused of being too radical. Then she was accused of not being radical enough. She was criticized for her appearance. She was criticized for not having children. She was criticized for her political positions. She was criticized for becoming the “face” of feminism. Which is, in a way, almost hilariously predictable.
A woman spends decades demanding that society stop judging women based on how they look, what they do with their lives, whether they marry, whether they have children, and whether they conform to expectations, and society responds by judging her based on exactly those things. Steinem’s life became its own demonstration of the problem she was fighting.
What Does Gloria Steinem Have to Do With Us?
It is easy to look at feminism in the 1970s and think: Wow. Glad we fixed that. Except…did we?
Women can vote. Women can own property. Women can go to college. Women can become CEOs, doctors, lawyers, professors, astronauts, presidents of organizations, and basically anything else that previous generations of women were told they couldn’t be. That progress is real. But so are the problems that remain.
Women are still navigating unequal expectations at home and at work. Reproductive rights remain politically contested. Sexual harassment and gender based violence have not disappeared. Women are still frequently judged by standards that men aren’t held to in quite the same way.
And now we have social media, which has somehow managed to simultaneously give women more ways to express themselves while giving everyone else more ways to tell women how they should look, dress, work, parent, date, eat, exercise and exist. We went from “women belong in the home” to “wake up at 5 a.m., drink chlorophyll water, work out, build a six-figure career, cook dinner, maintain a social life, and don’t forget your 10-step skincare routine.”
Progress? Technically. Exhausting? Absolutely. And that’s why Steinem’s ideas still matter.
Beyond the “That Girl”
Maybe the most interesting thing about Gloria Steinem’s legacy is that she was never really asking women to become “that girl.” She wasn’t telling women that there was one perfect way to be successful. She wasn’t saying every woman needed a career. She wasn’t saying every woman needed to reject marriage. She wasn’t saying every woman needed to become a political activist.
She was fighting for something much simpler: Choice. The choice to work. The choice to stay home. The choice to have children. The choice not to have children. The choice to marry. The choice not to marry. The choice to be ambitious. The choice to define success on your own terms. And perhaps most importantly, the choice to change your mind.
Because feminism isn’t about creating one new set of rules for women to follow. It is about questioning why women need a set of rules at all.
So, What Do We Do With Her Legacy?
Gloria Steinem’s greatest legacy isn’t a quote, a pair of glasses, or even a magazine. It’s a question: Who gets to decide what women are allowed to be?
For generations, the answer was men, institutions, governments, families, workplaces and cultural expectations. Steinem spent her life arguing that the answer should be women themselves. We may live in a world where women can post their opinions to millions of people from their bedrooms, but having a platform isn’t the same as having equality. A voice only matters if people are willing to listen.
Steinem spent her career making sure women had that voice, and refusing to let anyone convince them they were asking for too much. So maybe the next time we see “that girl” on our For You Page telling us to wake up at 5 a.m. and become the best version of ourselves, we can remember the women who fought for something much bigger than a perfect morning routine. They fought for the freedom to decide what the best version of ourselves even means.
And Gloria Steinem was one of the women who made that freedom possible.