MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Gloria Steinem has died. Her foundation posted online this morning that she died yesterday in New York City. She was 92 years old.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine, the first mass-market feminist monthly. She continued to write and speak about women's issues well into her 90s. If there was a Mount Rushmore for feminism, Gloria Steinem would probably be on it.
MARTIN: It might be awkward, even unpopular, to note this now. But it is a fact that she was attractive in a traditional way, with a signature style that was both instantly recognizable and politically useful. That, according to her friend and Ms. Magazine co-founder, Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN: She made it OK to be a feminist for people who thought, you know, all feminists were man-haters, and all feminists had hairy legs. And, you know, all the stereotypes we have all lived through.
MARTIN: When Ms. Magazine first hit the newsstands in 1972, the very name was considered radical. Many people had to be told how to pronounce it. Here's NPR's Linda Wertheimer on All Things Considered in a story about that first issue.
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LINDA WERTHEIMER: M-S - Ms., capital M, small S, period - a salutation recommended by secretarial handbooks for use when a woman's marital status is unknown.
INSKEEP: She would publish Ms. Magazine because she had begun her career as a journalist. Steinem's initial claim to fame was an article about going undercover as a Playboy bunny, which is what they called the cocktail waitresses at Playboy clubs. She told WHYY's Fresh Air that when she wanted to write about equality for women, she found magazines were not so receptive.
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GLORIA STEINEM: The magazine said, well, you know, we published our article on feminism last year. Or if we're going to write one article saying that women are full human beings, we'll have to publish one right next to it saying they're not in order to be objective.
MARTIN: Steinem spent most of her life traveling across the country and around the world to speak and organize and raise money on behalf of women's rights. Even into her 80s, she was likely to visit a dozen different cities in a month. In her 2015 memoir, "My Life On The Road," she traced her vagabond lifestyle to her childhood. Her father sold antiques town to town and took his family with him. But she told NPR that her unusual childhood wasn't a hardship. It was a gift.
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STEINEM: Which is the ability to live with insecurity and to be open to the next moment's adventure.
MARTIN: She took an interest in the people along the way, including taxi drivers and fellow airplane passengers.
INSKEEP: Her friend Letty Cottin Pogrebin said she'd remember these people. They were her family.
POGREBIN: Kids she meets along the way, the women who stay after her lectures, the people she meets on planes - you know, those are the people who mean something to her.
INSKEEP: Steinem had a number of high-profile romantic relationships but did not marry until her mid-60s. Her husband was David Bale, a British businessman, an animal rights activist and the father of the actor Christian Bale.
MARTIN: Steinem told NPR they spent just three years together before he died of brain cancer.
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STEINEM: I think that I came into his life to help him out of life. And he came into my life to make me live in the present because I live in the future otherwise.
INSKEEP: Steinem's career shows the evolution of feminism in society. In her early days, she was considered radical. By her later years, in 2013, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. She lived long enough to see huge changes in abortion rights. She had an illegal abortion at the age of 22. Later, the Supreme Court established abortion as a constitutional right and then took it away.
MARTIN: She told NPR she did not believe her work on reproductive justice was in vain.
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STEINEM: One thing I've learned over time, over and over again - that politics and deep change and, you know, everything we're trying to do is like a tree. And too often we think the tree grows from the top, from Congress. Trees grow from the bottom.
MARTIN: By everyday people and their communities. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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