Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother, Ruth Nuneviller, was of part German descent. Her Jewish-American father, Leo Steinem, was a traveling antiques dealer (with trailer and family in tow) and the son of immigrants from Germany and Poland.[1] The family split in 1944, when he went to California to find work while Gloria lived with her mother in Toledo. As a child in Toledo, she cared for her ill mother and helped support the family along with her sister Susanne.

Years later, Steinem described her relationship to her mother as pivotal to understanding of social injustices. At 34, Ruth Steinem had a "nervous breakdown" that left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent.[2] She changed "from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving" woman into "someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate long enough to read a book." Ruth spent months in-and-out of sanatoriums for the mentally disabled. Before her illness, Ruth had graduated with honors from Oberlin College, worked her way up to newspaper editor, and even taught a year of calculus at the college level. Steinem`s father, however, demanded that her mother relinquish her career, and divorced her after she became sick. The subsequent apathy of doctors, along with the social punishments for career-driven women, convinced Steinem women badly need social and political equality.

Gloria Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo, then graduated from Western High School in Washington, D.C. She attended Smith College, where she remains active.



Political awakening and activism

Gloria Steinem at news conference, Women`s Action Alliance, January 12, 1972In 1963 she was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club to research an article that exposed how women were treated at the clubs. The article was a sensation, making Steinem an in-demand writer in the process.

After conducting a series of celebrity interviews, Steinem eventually got a political assignment covering George McGovern`s presidential campaign, which led to a position in a New York magazine. Her 1962 article in Esquire magazine about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan`s book The Feminine Mystique by one year. She became politically active in the feminist movement, and the media seemed to appoint Steinem as a feminist leader of sorts. Steinem brought other notable feminists to the fore and toured the country with lawyer Florynce Rae "Flo" Kennedy, and in 1971, cofounded the National Women`s Political Caucus as well as the Women`s Action Alliance.

In 1972, she co-founded the feminist-themed Ms. magazine . When the first regular issue hit the newsstands in July 1972, its 300,000 "one-shot" test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. It generated an astonishing 26,000 subscription orders and over 20,000 reader letters within weeks. Steinem would continue to write for the magazine until it was sold in 1987. The magazine changed hands again in 2001, to the Feminist Majority Foundation; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors, and serves on the advisory board.[3]

In May 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, raised the question of whether Steinem had continuing ties with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Though she admitted work for a CIA-financed foun