Gloria Steinem and the Magazines in Their Lockers

She kept a promise to live the life she chose. Then she spent six decades helping other women understand that their lives belonged to them, too.

When I was in school, it seemed as if almost every girl had a copy of Ms. magazine in her locker.

I remember the title. I remember those covers. I remember how ordinary its presence seemed.

What I do not remember is ever asking what those pages meant to the girls reading them.

I was a boy. The culture had arranged things so that girls’ inner lives could be all around us without boys ever being expected to understand them. We saw the magazine. We did not necessarily see the hand reaching for it between classes, or wonder what that girl found inside that she was not finding at home, in church, in school or anywhere else.

Now, after Gloria Steinem’s death, I keep thinking about those lockers.

Steinem died peacefully at her New York home on September 2, 2026. She was 92. The obituaries rightly describe the journalist, organizer, author and cofounder of Ms. who became the most recognizable face of American feminism. But fame is the least interesting measure of what she did. She spent more than six decades building places where women could tell the truth about their lives and discover that the truth was shared.

She did not give women voices. Women already had voices.

She helped build the microphones and the rooms where those voices could finally hear one another.

Steinem’s own life began without much stability. Her father was a traveling antiques dealer, and the family moved around so often that she did not attend school regularly until roughly seventh grade. After her parents separated, a ten-year-old Gloria was left caring for her mother, Ruth, a once-promising journalist whose depression and mental illness had swallowed most of the life available to her. Long before Steinem had political language for it, she had watched ability become confinement. She had seen what dependence could do to a woman. That childhood shaped both her understanding of injustice and her refusal to accept the life women were expected to inherit.

Then, at 22, she became pregnant.

It was 1957. Abortion was illegal. She was in London, on her way to India, having broken an engagement to a good man she knew she did not want to marry. A physician named Dr. John Sharpe helped her obtain an abortion at considerable legal risk. He asked her for two promises: do not reveal his name, and do what you want to do with your life.

Nearly sixty years later, Steinem dedicated My Life on the Road to him. After finally naming the dead doctor who had recognized an unjust law for what it was, she wrote: “I’ve done the best I could with my life.” She had kept the promise.

That would be a remarkable life story even if everything after it had been smaller.

It was not.

India did not merely give Steinem somewhere to go. It taught her how she would spend the rest of her life. She lived among students at a women’s college, traveled in women-only train compartments where strangers exchanged intimate stories, and joined followers of Gandhi’s disciple Vinoba Bhave as they walked through communities torn apart by caste violence. They did not arrive announcing what everyone else needed. They gathered people, listened and sought consensus.

Steinem carried one lesson home: “Ask the people what they want, don’t tell them what they need.” The woman later remembered for speaking learned first how to listen. Her American organizing, she said, became a Western version of those walks from village to village. The talking circles that became central to her work grew from what she learned from Indian women and grassroots organizers.

Back in New York, she wanted to report on politics. Male editors steered her toward fashion and textured stockings. One editor offered her a choice between joining him in a hotel room or mailing his letters on her way out. There was not yet a commonly understood phrase for sexual harassment. It was treated as a condition of employment.

Her famous undercover investigation inside the Playboy Club exposed miserable pay, sexual demands and degrading working conditions. The story made her visible, but the part people forget is that it also damaged her career. Editors saw a Bunny where a reporter stood. She later called the assignment a professional disaster because its image was used to trivialize her for years. Even the work that proved her courage became another way to reduce her.

Her political awakening came in 1969, in a church basement, while covering an abortion speak-out. Woman after woman described what the law, secrecy and shame had done to her. Steinem had told almost no one about her own abortion. Hearing women publicly take seriously something that happened only to women produced what she called the “big click.”

She became an activist because women told the truth in a room, and the room believed them.

Even then, she was terrified of public speaking. Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black civil-rights organizer who had created desperately needed child care and community programs in New York, helped her find the courage to do it. They traveled together, speaking about the inseparable effects of sex, race and class. That famous photograph of Steinem raising a fist was never a solo portrait. Hughes was standing beside her. Their partnership lasted nearly fifty years, although history has too often remembered one woman more clearly than the other.

That matters. Gloria Steinem was not the women’s movement. She was extraordinary partly because, at her best, she understood that no one woman could be.

In 1971, female journalists and activists crowded into living rooms because they shared the same maddening problem: editors would not publish serious stories about women. Steinem initially imagined a newsletter. Attorney and organizer Brenda Feigen pushed for a glossy national magazine, something that could reach beyond people already in the movement and sit on the same newsstands as every publication telling women how to cook, dress, clean and please a husband.

They called it Ms. The title itself was an argument. A man was “Mr.” whether he was married or single. Why should a woman’s title be an announcement of her relationship to a man?

The preview issue did not tiptoe. It included Johnnie Tillmon’s “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” an article about women loving women that the founders had been warned not to publish, a piece about the invisible labor expected of housewives and a declaration titled “We Have Had Abortions.” Fifty-three prominent women put their names behind that statement while abortion remained illegal across most of the country. The issue said publicly what women had been forced to whisper privately.

The experts predicted failure. The 300,000 preview copies sold out in eight days. Within weeks, Ms. received approximately 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 letters.

Not comments. Not likes. Letters. Bags and bags of them, taking up so much room in the office that there was space for little else.

Again and again, readers expressed the same revelation: “At last, I know I’m not alone.” One letter, written in crayon, came from a girl furious that boys had been given most of the playground while the girls were confined to a corner. “We girls are angry as turnips,” she announced. Steinem answered her. The readers did not merely consume Ms.; their experiences helped determine what it covered.

This is what I did not understand when I saw those magazines in school lockers.

For a girl who had been told she was too loud, too ambitious, too sexual, not sexual enough, too angry or simply wrong about the unfairness she could plainly see, Ms. could be evidence. It gave names to experiences that isolation had made feel like personal defects: domestic violence, sexual harassment, acquaintance rape, unequal pay, coerced sex, unpaid labor, the need for child care and the right to control whether and when to become a mother.

Naming did not magically fix any of it. Naming made organizing possible.

In 1976, Ms. put a battered woman’s bruised face on its cover. The next year it confronted workplace sexual harassment. Barbara Mikulski later said the first legislation she introduced as a member of Congress to help battered women grew from listening to women and reading about the problem in Ms. Shelters opened. Laws followed. A private nightmare became a public responsibility. The magazine did not merely reflect change; some of its reporting helped cause it.

And Steinem kept building. She helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus with women including Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan; the Women’s Action Alliance with Pitman Hughes; the Ms. Foundation for Women; Voters for Choice; and, later, the Women’s Media Center. She understood that a movement cannot survive on speeches alone. It needs organizations, money, candidates, reporting, local leadership and somewhere for the next person to begin.

Icons become useless when we sand them into saints. Steinem’s record had real shadows. As a young woman, she ran an anti-Communist student project covertly funded by the CIA and continued to defend that choice. Ms. repeatedly fell short of its ambition to represent all women; Alice Walker resigned in 1986 over covers and coverage that remained overwhelmingly white. Those facts belong in the history, too. So do the voices of the women who challenged Ms. from within and forced feminism to become more honest about whom it was leaving out. Steinem’s 1977 writing about transgender people included damaging language; in 2013, she said the old words did not reflect what was now known and affirmed trans people’s right to live authentically. She apologized for the pain those words had caused. Her 1998 defense of Bill Clinton’s behavior deserved the criticism it received; in 2017, she said she would not write the same piece again.

None of that needs to be hidden, and none of it erases the scale of what she accomplished. Women should not have to be immaculate to be historically important. That is one more impossible standard. The honest measure is whether the world contained more freedom because they were here.

Because Gloria Steinem was here, it did.

There is also no honest way to tell the end of her life without confronting what was taken back.

She had an illegal abortion in 1957. She lived to see Roe v. Wade establish a federal constitutional protection for abortion in 1973. She then lived long enough to watch the Supreme Court eliminate that protection in 2022. By the time she died, 13 states had total or near-total abortion bans and four more prohibited abortion at roughly six weeks, often before a woman knows she is pregnant. Steinem called the reversal not only an attack on women, but a setback for democracy.

At 22, an unjust law told her that her future and her body were not entirely hers. At 88, her country’s highest court withdrew the national protection that had spared later generations from that same condition.

The circle was not poetic. It was obscene.

She died knowing that a right central to her life’s work had been pushed backward. She also died knowing something Americans forget whenever one victory lasts long enough to feel normal: progress has no warranty. A right is not permanently won because a generation becomes accustomed to having it.

But she did not die defeated.

Her final memoir, An Unexpected Life, was completed before her death and is scheduled for publication on September 22. In it, she described herself as happier than she had imagined she could be, surrounded by friends who had become chosen family. She wrote that she planned to live to 100. At 92, she still believed there were books left in her and work left to do. Hope, for Steinem, was not a prediction that everything would turn out fine. It was a reason to keep working before anyone could know.

She did not get those final eight years.

The rest of us did.

The girls who kept Ms. in their lockers are older women now. They became teachers, nurses, lawyers, artists, laborers, business owners, public officials, mothers, women who chose not to become mothers, survivors and leaders. Some remember precisely what those articles gave them. Some may only remember the feeling that another kind of life was possible.

And the boys who saw the magazine without understanding it are older men now.

We have a responsibility, too. Equality cannot remain women’s homework. Bodily autonomy is not a special interest belonging to the people whose bodies are being regulated. A democracy cannot call half its population equal while making their most consequential decisions subject to politicians who will never have to live inside the consequences.

I wish I had understood then what I understand now.

Those were not merely magazines in those lockers.

They were doors.

Gloria Steinem kept her promise to live the life she chose. She helped millions of other people see that they could choose their lives, too.

Now the promise is ours.

Reporting note: Legal and biographical details are current through September 8, 2026. Additional background came from the National Women’s History Museum, Ms. magazine’s history, the Museum of the City of New York, and contemporary reporting linked throughout the article.