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Gloria Steinem: Chronicling the India chapter of feminist pioneer’s journey
Steinem also had a deep association with India, where she encountered and absorbed many foundational ideas that later shaped her work
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Gloria Steinem, an American journalist, author and activist who was one of the most enduring faces of the feminist movement and the face of the reproductive and civil rights of women in the US, has died, her foundation announced Thursday. She was 92.
Steinem also had a deep association with India, where she encountered and absorbed many foundational ideas that later shaped her work. Long before Steinem became one of the most visible advocates for women’s rights, she was a young American woman in her early 20s in Delhi, trying to work out what to do with her life.
In 1956, shortly after graduating from Smith College, Steinem arrived in India on a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship. She spent part of her time in Delhi as a student at Miranda House, then a relatively unusual destination for a young American woman travelling alone.
“Her association with Miranda House began during her formative years when she spent a year at the college. Her experience in India and her time at the college left a lasting impression on her worldview and her subsequent journey as a feminist and social activist,” said the college, which also held a condolence meet on Thursday.
At Miranda House, her classmates taught her to wear a sari and navigate city buses. She took up odd jobs to support herself, including helping design sandals, writing promotional material and doing modelling assignments. She also featured as the face of a DCM (Delhi Cloth Mill) nylon sari advertisement.
But it was outside the classroom that India left its deepest mark. Steinem became associated with MN Roy’s Radical Humanists and travelled with Gandhian activists. She worked in villages in what is now Tamil Nadu, alongside people involved in Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement, which sought to persuade landowners to give land to the landless. Her India experience exposed her to poverty, caste, inequality and grassroots organising.
For days, she trudged from village to village, everywhere encountering stories of atrocities and violence. “But mostly we just listened. To my amazement, long and emotion-filled meetings often ended with village leaders pledging to take no revenge on caste groups whose members had attacked their group in neighbouring villages,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road.
In her Substack dated March 21, 2025, Steinem pulled an excerpt from her essay titled “Doing Sixty” from her 1995 book “Moving Beyond Words”.
“When I reflect on the importance of India in my life, I think most of all of sitting on a New Delhi veranda in the 1970s, drinking tea with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, whose first name was (and is) enough to identify her in many countries of the world. Biographical dictionaries list her as “freedom fighter, social worker, writer.” In the 1950s, when I first met her, she was also in her fifties and already a legend for her leading role in the Freedom Struggle with Gandhi and Nehru-an activism for which she spent five years in British jails — and for her pioneering of the Indian handicraft movement. Our meeting was arranged by my oldest friend in India, Devaki Jain, because we wanted to ask Kamaladevi’s advice. Since Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics were so well suited to women’s movements around the world, we were thinking of studying his letters and writings, distilling what was most useful, and creating a kind of Gandhian/feminist handbook,” she wrote.
Steinem shot to fame in America in the 1960s as a journalist, a writer, a political activist and a feminist. She went on to campaign for reproductive rights and became a social commentator on issues such as prostitution, human trafficking and pornography. In 1971, she founded Ms. magazine, a feminist publication that focused on problems faced by women. She founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 and later the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the Women’s Media Center and Voters for Choice, which was aimed at promoting policies to maintain safe, legal and accessible abortion services for women.
In Delhi in 2007, she recalled spending two years in the country in the 1950s, saying that what she learned here remained a continuous influence throughout her life.
Steinem continued her involvement with Ruchira Gupta’s Apne Aap Women Worldwide organisation, which works with trafficked women and children. While talking to Mint in 2014, she said that she was excited by the movement in the wake of the December 16, 2012 gang rape case. “It’s what I love about India. The people will put up with only so much and then it will all erupt as they say enough,” she had said.
“While laws are important, change must begin from the family. Human beings are profoundly sensitive to context. So patriarchal families will produce patriarchal sons and daughters who will be submissive,” she also said.
More than five decades after young Steinem arrived in Delhi, the city hosted a very different version of her. In January 2014, at 79, she returned to the India International Centre to launch “As If Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader.” The event brought her together with some of India’s leading feminists, including Ela Bhatt, Devaki Jain and Ruchira Gupta.
Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the second of two children to Leo Steinem, an itinerant antiques salesman, and Ruth Nuneviller, a journalist who was the first editor in-chief of the school newspaper at the University of Toledo.
Her parents separated when she was 10, and Steinem lived with and cared for her mother, who had suffered several nervous breakdowns. After graduating from Western High School in Washington, Steinem attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she studied government. On her way to India, aged 22, and recently having broken off an engagement, Steinem had an illegal abortion, she recounted in My Life on the Road.
Steinem was a leader of the so-called Second Wave of feminism, which started in the 1960s. After women in the US fought for, and won, the right to vote in 1920, Second Wave feminists sought economic and social equality in areas ranging from sexuality to the labour market.
But she faced criticism for her association with CIA. She acknowledged that a youth festival she had organised was largely funded by the agency but defended her motives.
