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Gloria Steinem and the feminism that refused to behave

The poster-girl of second-wave feminism turned women’s private grievances into a movement that changed how generations understood equality — from abortions to MeToo.

For decades, women’s magazines across the world had perfected the art of telling women how to be good mothers and wives — how to keep a husband happy, make a home beautiful, raise children, lose weight and look younger. Then, in 1971, fierce feminist Gloria Steinem helped launch Ms., and the magazine asked a far more destabilising question: What if the problem was not that women were failing at womanhood, but that the terms of womanhood themselves were rigged?

For Steinem, women’s inequality was never just private misfortune or an unfortunate fact of life. When she died Wednesday at 92 at her home in New York, she left behind something larger than a body of feminist writing or a catalogue of political causes. The poster girl of second wave feminism, Steinem embellished the movement for over half a century with its language, its magazine, its marches and, most importantly, a recognisable face.

The first wave of feminism, which gathered force in the 19th and early 20th centuries, fought primarily for women’s formal political and legal rights, most famously the right to vote. The second wave, emerging in the 1960s, pushed the argument into the terrain of work, sex, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and reproductive freedom — issues that had long been compartmentalised as women’s problems. They became matters of public argument partly because women like Steinem insisted on dragging them out of the private sphere.

She made women feel that their lives were not small subjects. That someone was standing up for them and repeatedly questioning the supposedly natural arrangement that benefited men disproportionately.

For a young woman growing up decades later, Steinem could represent something simpler. I........

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