GLORIA STEINEM

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

She was born to a rebellious Scotch Presbyterian mother, raised in Theosophy, and baptized in a Congregational church at the age of ten because her mother thought she should be old enough to remember it. She lost what little interest she had in religion when she became a feminist and started “wondering why God always looks like the ruling class,” but she still loves the pagan parts of Christmas—the tree, presents, and midnight Mass. With all this, what is Gloria Steinem doing in a Jewish women’s encyclopedia?

She is included here because her father was a Jew, because she considers herself an outsider and sees Jews as the quintessential out-group, and because she feels drawn to the spirituality and social justice agenda of Jewish feminism. She is here because, as she puts it, “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.” Finally, she is here because in the eyes of the world she is Jewish, and thus whatever she does is associated with Jews and Judaism, for good or for ill.

When historians distill the essence of the women’s movement known as the Second Wave (as opposed to the suffrage campaign, the First Wave), they often embody it in two names—Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem—both ground-breaking pioneers, both identified as Jews. By the same token, when extremists of the ultra-right excoriate feminism, they name Steinem (along with Friedan and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug) as a leader of the “Jewish conspiracy” to destroy the Christian family. They claim that the struggle for abortion rights is a Jewish plot to kill Christian babies, or that empowering children, women and minorities is a threat to the God-given hegemony of white Christian men. If Steinem is their Jew, she is ours.

Although she is recognized around the world as a writer, speaker, political activist, and feminist visionary, the facts about Gloria Steinem’s Jewish origins, tenuous and meager though they may be, are virtually unknown. To recognize those connections here is not to exaggerate their significance but merely to acknowledge the unacknowledged and to suggest that even without full-fledged Jewish identity—one forged by affiliation or halakhic legitimacy (religious law)—this is a woman who acts Jewishly in the world.

Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to Ruth and Leo Steinem. Her father, an itinerant antique dealer, spent winters selling his wares from a house trailer, usually with his family in tow; as a result, Gloria did not spend a full year in school until she was twelve years old. In the summers, Leo owned and operated a beach resort at Clark Lake, Michigan, where little Gloria apprenticed herself to the nightclub entertainers and learned to tap-dance.

Steinem’s appreciation of Judaism, such as it was, came at the hands of her non-Jewish mother. A former journalist, Ruth Steinem took some pains to make sure both Gloria and her older sister, Susanne, understood the evils of antisemitism and knew about the horrific crimes of the Holocaust. Steinem remembers that when she was eight or so, her mother encouraged her to listen to a radio dramatization of Jewish torment under the Nazis and the story of a mother who could not get enough food for her little girl. “This is going on in the world,” Ruth Steinem said, “and we must know about it.” She also taught her daughters that being Jewish was a proud heritage.

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, Gloria’s paternal grandmother, was born in Germany after her family’s escape from Russia and grew up in Munich, the daughter of a cantor. She achieved the equivalent of a college education in order to become a teacher, then married Joseph Steinem and immigrated to America. Pauline Steinem died when Gloria was five, but she left her granddaughter with vivid “sense memories” of an intelligent, calm, well-organized woman who remains a strong role model. A well-known women’s rights activist, chair of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education, Pauline Steinem was also a leader in the movement for vocational education. She was deeply distressed by the gathering stormclouds in Germany. In the mid-1930s, during the early years of the Nazi terror, when it cost five hundred dollars to get a Jew out of Germany and into Palestine, Pauline Steinem managed to rescue many members of her family.

Despite having the benefits of a hard-won education at the University of Toledo and a career as a journalist at a time when she first had to write under a man’s name, Ruth Steinem’s spirit was broken by the conflict between work and family that caused her to give up the career she loved. In response to this and other strains, she suffered incapacitating depressions and hallucinations. She and Leo divorced in 1945, and eleven-year-old Gloria became housekeeper, cook, and caregiver to her mother during a period that, at best, can be called cheerless and at worst, spiritually and financially impoverished. In her early teens, Gloria performed at local clubs for ten dollars a night, hoping to tap-dance her way out of Toledo. When she was sixteen, she worked as a salesgirl after school and on Saturdays. The following year, she was rescued by Susanne, who persuaded their father, despite the divorce, to take over Ruth’s care for one year so that Gloria could get away and live with her sister in Washington, D.C.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/steinem-gloria

In 1952, after graduating from Washington’s Western High School, Steinem entered Smith College, where she danced in college productions and majored in government. She spent her junior year in Geneva and a summer in Oxford, earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, and graduated magna cum laude. A Chester Bowles Fellowship sent her to India, where for nearly two years she immersed herself in the culture of a people she grew to love and would often write about, first in a government guidebook, The 1000 Indias, and later in essays on the relevance of Gandhian principles to grassroots organizing, especially for the women’s movement.

Back in the United States in 1958, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked for Independent Research Service, a group that tried to persuade American students to attend communist youth festivals then being held in Europe. Hoping for a career as a writer, she moved to New York City in 1960, a time when women were expected to be Gal Fridays and gossip columnists, not serious journalists. She managed to cobble a modest living from odd scraps of assignments—working with Harvey Kurtzman, creator of Mad magazine, on his new project, Help!, a journal of political satire, and contributing short articles to Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other women’s magazines. She also did unsigned pieces for Esquire, which eventually published her first bylined piece, a story about the then-new contraceptive pill. A year later, in 1963, Steinem herself made headlines when she got an assignment from Show magazine for which she took a job as a Bunny at the Playboy Club and wrote an exposé of the unglamorous working conditions of the club’s glorified waitresses—sex objects in rabbit ears and cotton tails.