Editor’s note: Gloria Steinem died on Sep. 2, 2026, at ag 92. We are resurfacing this 2013 story about her life and legacy.

The first time journalist, organizer, and Ms. magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem graced the podium at the National Press Club, it was as the first woman ever invited to do so. However many points one might give the club’s members for having chosen the country’s most famous feminist for that honor, some must be subtracted for their having handed her what was then the standard thank you gift to Press Club speakers: a man’s tie.

When Steinem took the podium on Monday, it was to mark her impending receipt of a far more welcome piece of neckwear: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to be bestowed on her by President Barack Obama at the White House Wednesday. “There is no president in history from whose hand I would be more honored to receive this medal,” she said.

“I’d be crazy,” Steinem told the Press Club audience, “if I didn’t understand that this was a medal for the entire women’s movement. It belongs to Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug and Patsy Mink.”

She noted that President Lyndon B. Johnson declined to give Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger the medal because, Steinem said, “he feared reprisal from the Catholic church.”

Radicalized by Abortion

Before she was known as a leader of the movement then called, in the popular lexicon, “women’s lib,” Steinem was the glamorous “girl writer” who had gone undercover as a Playboy bunny in an investigation for Show magazine, and whose male colleagues at New York Magazine, which she helped found, told her, she said, “You write like a man.” (That was intended as a compliment.)

Steinem’s “a-ha moment,” the thing that spurred her to the world of activism, she said, was a reporting assignment to cover an “abortion speak-out,” a gathering where women who had had abortions, which were then illegal, told their stories.

“And then I had an epiphany, which was related to my own experience. … I realized that I had not told the truth about having [had] an abortion myself at 22, and why?” she asked the Press Club audience. “If one in three American women, approximately, has needed an abortion at sometime in her life, why not? What was secret about it? And then as soon as I started to speak about it … I discovered it was often part of other people’s experience, or their families’ experience.”

She went on to tell her oft-repeated story of sitting in the back of a taxi in Boston with Florynce Kennedy, the movement pioneer who was one of the........

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