Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist who spent a lifetime dismantling the American family, died Wednesday at her New York City home at 92 — and the establishment press is already canonizing her as a secular saint. The real question for working Americans is what her revolution cost them.
Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1972 and the National Women's Political Caucus, turning both into engines for abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the broader redefinition of women's role in society. CNN framed her as a "feminist icon" who "became the face of second-wave feminism." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called her a "celebrated author and activist" and a "potent voice." The New York Post went with "pioneering feminist." What none of these obituaries pause to examine is the world her pioneering actually built.
Here is what the outlets do agree on: Steinem never married until age 66, when she wed businessman David Bale — who died of brain lymphoma just three years later, according to the Post. which also noted she "never had children of her own." She spent her prime years traveling the country speaking at rallies and on campuses, advocating for abortion on demand, sex education, and the Equal Rights Amendment. She testified before the Senate in favor of the ERA in 1970, CNN reported. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013.
CNN noted that Steinem's grandmother was Jewish and helped rescue family members from Germany in the mid-1930s — a biographical detail the other outlets omitted. The Post, meanwhile, was the only outlet to mention her late-in-life marriage and childlessness, details that cut against the liberation narrative.
Steinem's own words reveal the project. In a 1969 article for New York Magazine titled "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," she explicitly called for linking feminist organizing with other movements to form what she termed a "revolutionary vanguard," according to CNN. This wasn't accidental — it was a deliberate strategy to restructure American life along ideological lines.
The AJC, drawing on AP reporting, acknowledged that Steinem faced hostility not just from the right but from the left — female callers who "came, of course, from the family," and people who called her a "feminist, hard, hurtful" because she was "assigned beautiful and therefore couldn't be serious." But the outlet buried the significance: the hostility from families was the point. The revolution required severing women from their kin and their traditions.
What Steinem and her allies achieved was the transformation of motherhood from a vocation into a liability. Women were told their worth came from a paycheck, not a home — and then corporations got two workers for the price of one while wages stagnated and families fractured. The feminists got their revolution. Ordinary Americans got the bill.
The press will spend the week celebrating Steinem's "near-century on earth" as "years well-lived," in the words of her foundation's statement. What they won't ask is whether the women who followed her blueprint — childless, alone, working until the end — would describe it the same way.
