Gloria Steinem: A Biography
Gloria Steinem has become a name synonymous with feminism and she is best known as a feminist activists. She co-founded Ms. Magazine and served as one of its editors for 15 years. She was also the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women and a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She also helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance.
Along with her activism, she is a bestselling author and renowned lecturer. She has been published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women’s magazines as well as for publications in other countries, while working as a freelance writer.
She is often the spokeswoman of issues of equality. Her particular interests are the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, nonviolent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice.
Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956. She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justices 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. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in in promoting girls’ self-esteem.
In a recent interview with Marianne Schnall, Steinem was asked what she thought were the biggest challenges that women face today. Steinem responded, “Whatever each individual woman is facing; only she knows her biggest challenge. However, if we add up the problems that affect the biggest numbers of women, then issues having to do with physical safety and reproduction are still the biggest. Female bodies are stull the battleground, whether that means restricting freedom, birth control and sage abortion in order to turn them into factories, or abandoning female infants because females are less valuable for everything other than reproduction. If you add up all the forms of gynocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That’s a holocaust every year. It makes sense that reproductive freedom is still the biggest issue- because the reason females got in this jam in the first place was because the patriarchal state or religion or family wanted to control reproduction – to decide how many workers, how many children the nation needs, and who owned them in systems of legitimacy – or even outright slaver. The International Labor Organization says there are about 12 million people living in literal slavery around the worlds. And 80 percent of them are women and girls.”
She currently lives in New York, where she is working on a book about her 30+ years as a feminist organizer and also working with the Sophia Smith College on a project to document the grassroots origins of the U.S. women’s movement.
(http://www.gloriasteinem.com/)
