Sixty years after she helped ignite a national conversation about women's rights, Gloria Steinem remains one of the most recognizable faces of American feminism. With reproductive rights again at the center of political debate and a new documentary tracing her career set for release this fall, her legacy offers a lens through which to examine how far gender equality has come—and how much remains contested.
What the Left Is Saying
Steinem's defenders credit her with laying critical groundwork for modern reproductive rights activism. As founding editor of Ms. Magazine starting in 1971, she helped bring issues like workplace discrimination and reproductive freedom into mainstream political discourse that had previously been dismissed or ignored by major publications.
Her 1969 essay "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" helped crystallize second-wave feminist priorities at a moment when many activists were choosing between movements. Supporters argue this synthesis of racial and gender justice created space for the coalitions that followed.
Progressives point to her decades-long speaking tour schedule—appearing at hundreds of college campuses and organizing conferences—that seeded activist networks still active today. Her work advising Democratic campaigns in later years, they argue, reflected legitimate engagement rather than journalistic compromise.
What the Right Is Saying
Critics from conservative circles have long argued that Steinem's brand of feminism often prioritized elite perspectives over working-class women's concerns. Some historians note that second-wave feminist organizing sometimes failed to address the needs of women in communities who faced intersecting forms of discrimination beyond gender alone.
Others contend that her political activism, including her later work advising Democratic campaigns and her controversial 2016 primary endorsement of Hillary Clinton, blurred the line between journalism and advocacy in ways that undermined public trust in media institutions she came to represent. Conservative critics also argue that her emphasis on intersectionality, while influential within progressive circles, sometimes complicated coalition-building by centering identity politics over broader economic concerns that resonated across demographic lines.
What the Numbers Show
When Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1971, women comprised roughly 6 percent of Congress—just 13 female members across both chambers. Today, women hold 28 percent of House seats and 27 percent of Senate positions, reflecting a more than four-fold increase over five decades.
In journalism, the percentage of women in newsrooms hovered near 30 percent throughout much of the 1960s. Industry surveys now show women representing approximately 40 percent of daily newspaper staff, though significant disparities persist in leadership roles and certain coverage beats.
Steinem herself has delivered public remarks at more than 500 college campuses and international forums over her career spanning from the early 1960s through her later years of continued writing on reproductive rights and global women's movements. Ms. Magazine, now published continuously for over five decades with peak circulation reaching approximately 500,000 readers during its height in the 1970s and 1980s, helped launch investigative reporting on domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment that informed federal legislation.
The Bottom Line
Steinem remained active into her later years, continuing to write and speak on issues including reproductive rights, political participation, and global women's movements. Her work helped establish frameworks for thinking about gender equality that influenced subsequent generations of activists and policymakers, though debates continue about which populations benefited most from second-wave feminist organizing.