Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer, and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of gender and race caste systems, in non-violent conflict resolution, in the cultures of indigenous peoples, and in organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. In 2013, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, this country’s highest civilian honor. Her most recent book is, My Life on the Road. She lives in New York City.
Here’s a bit more about Gloria’s career:
In 1968, she helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. In 1972, she co-founded Ms. magazine, remained one of its editors for fifteen years, and continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., now published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime. In 2017, she narrated, and with Amy Richards, executive produced, WOMAN, a Viceland series of eight documentaries on violence against women in eight countries. She continues to write for newspapers and magazines, and to serve on the board of the Women’s Media Center, Equality Now, Donor Direct Action and Direct Impact Africa. She is an advisor to Times Up, a movement for a safe, equal and dignified work for women of all kinds.
Her books include My Life on the Road , Revolution from Within , Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions , Moving Beyond Words , and Marilyn: Norma Jean , on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and in India, As If Women Matter . Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks. She was an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History.
Gloria helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group founded to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office. She co-founded Choice USA (now URGE ), a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and comprehensive sex education in schools. She is the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, an international day devoted to girls. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. In 2004, she co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, an online source of news stories and women experts on current events.
As a writer, Gloria has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women’s Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the 2009 James Weldon Johnson Award for Journalism, and the 2015 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.
Having gone to public high schools in Toledo, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., Gloria graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism. She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. In 2014, she received the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award. Rutgers University has created the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies, to begin in 2018. In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, “Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories.” With Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, “Better Off Dead,” which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty. In 2017, she was host and co-executive producer of the Emmy-nominated VICE series, WOMAN , on violence against women in eight countries.
Gloria has been the subject of three television documentaries, including HBO’s Gloria: In Her Own Words , and is among the subjects of the 2013 PBS documentary MAKERS, a continuing project to record the women who made America. She was the subject of The Education of a Woman , a biography by Carolyn Heilbrun, and also biographies for children.
