The Indian roots of Gloria Steinem’s feminism

This article is authored by Mousumi Roy, columnist, politics, culture and economic history.

When Gloria Steinem arrived in India in 1957, she was not yet the feminist organiser who would help transform American public life. She was 22, had recently graduated from Smith College, and was uncertain about the future awaiting her at home.

Gloria Steinem (Reuters Photo)

Her journey was partly an escape. Steinem was engaged to Blair Chotzinoff, a pilot from a prominent New York family, but recoiled from a marriage that she feared would close down rather than enlarge her life. While waiting in London for an Indian visa, she discovered that she was pregnant and obtained an illegal abortion. The experience would later inform one of her most enduring political convictions: Without control over reproduction, women could not exercise meaningful control over their lives.

Steinem travelled to India on a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship, entering a country scarcely a decade removed from colonial rule. She arrived with romantic expectations, imagining an India of ancient splendour and “jewelled elephants”. Those images were quickly displaced by the poverty she encountered and by the social and political complexity of the newly independent nation.

These experiences mattered because they placed her inside social spaces where women spoke candidly among themselves. Rather than encountering India principally through officials or intellectual elites, she began learning through conversation and observation.

Historian Rashida Shafiq has traced this formative period through Steinem’s fellowship reports, memoirs and other archival material. Her research suggests that the Indian experience gave Steinem an organising repertoire she could not yet name: Listening across differences, connecting personal testimony to structures of power, preferring lateral organisation to rigid hierarchy and treating consensus as a political practice rather than an inconvenience.

Steinem encountered these ideas in several distinct settings. She met Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the Gandhian activist and former princess who became independent India’s first health minister. She also spent time with Indira Gandhi, then years away from becoming prime minister.

At a radical humanist study camp in Mussoorie, she joined discussions among followers of MN Roy. Once an important figure in international Communism, Roy had broken with orthodox Marxism and developed a political philosophy centred on democracy, reason and individual freedom.

From these discussions, Steinem came to understand that radicalism did not necessarily mean violence or extremism. It could mean proceeding to the root of an injustice. Equally important was the proposition that political ends could not be separated from the means used to achieve them.

Her most significant education, however, took place outside formal institutions. On a third-class railway journey from Calcutta to Kerala, Steinem travelled in a carriage reserved for women. The compartment became a moving domestic and social world. Women fed their children, shared food and exchanged stories about marriage, childbirth, contraception and family life. The division between private experience and public knowledge began to dissolve.

Years later, consciousness-raising groups would become a central practice of the American women’s movement. By speaking collectively about experiences conventionally dismissed as personal, women discovered recurring patterns of domestic inequality, sexual coercion, professional discrimination and economic dependence. Private problems could consequently be recognised as political conditions.

Steinem did not invent this method in India, nor did India supply her with a complete feminist philosophy. What she witnessed was more fundamental: the capacity of conversation to turn individual experience into collective understanding. As she later recognised, such an exchange could not have occurred had she been isolated from other passengers in a private railway compartment.

The principle acquired still greater urgency after caste violence erupted in Ramnad, in what was then Madras state, in 1957. Steinem accompanied workers associated with Vinoba Bhave, the Gandhian reformer whose movements advocated non-violence, land redistribution and social reconciliation.

The activists walked between communities affected by the violence, attempting to counter rumours, discourage retaliation and bring people together. Steinem travelled with few possessions and attended meetings beneath trees and in village courtyards. There, survivors described killings, rape, theft and arson.

The experience taught her that an organiser’s first responsibility was not to arrive with ready-made solutions. It was to listen. Steinem later condensed the lesson into a rejection of political paternalism: Ask people what they want rather than telling them what they need.

This method challenged the conventional relationship between leaders and those they claimed to represent. Political expertise did not have to confer the authority to command. Organisation could instead begin with testimony and proceed through participation, allowing people ordinarily treated as recipients of assistance to define their own priorities.

Steinem returned to the US in 1958, although it would take more than a decade for her Indian experiences to acquire an identifiable place in her political life. American journalism afforded women few opportunities to write seriously about politics. She initially became widely known for her 1963 investigation of working conditions at New York’s Playboy Club, for which she worked undercover as a Playboy Bunny.

By the end of the 1960s, Steinem had emerged as a prominent advocate of women’s liberation. She helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and co-founded Ms. magazine, which brought abortion, domestic violence, employment discrimination and unequal domestic labour into mainstream political discussion.

The connections to India then became clearer. The consciousness-raising circles of the women’s movement resembled the intimate discussions Steinem had encountered among Indian women. Her preference for travelling, listening and decentralised organising recalled the Gandhian workers she had accompanied through rural communities. She eventually described her activism across the US as a western version of walking from village to village.

India also entered the visual language of Ms. Its 1972 preview issue depicted an American housewife as a many-armed Hindu goddess, simultaneously pregnant and burdened with a frying pan, telephone, iron, clock and other instruments of domestic obligation. Steinem said that the image emerged from her Indian past.

Viewed today, the cover also exposes a tension within Steinem’s internationalism. Using Kali as a metaphor for the overworked American woman transformed a religious figure into a symbol readily legible to a western audience. It raises questions about the unequal movement of cultural imagery and about the tendency of western feminism to incorporate experiences from elsewhere without always preserving their historical specificity.

That tension should not be obscured. Steinem travelled with the privileges and mobility of a white American visitor, and her interpretation of India necessarily remained partial. Neither should her individual biography be permitted to absorb the agency of the Indian women and political workers from whom she learned.

However, acknowledging these limitations makes the history more significant, not less. Standard accounts frequently locate the methods of American second-wave feminism within the civil-rights movement and the New Left. Both were indispensable. Steinem’s story nevertheless reveals another, less examined genealogy: Ideas and organisational practices that travelled from postcolonial India into American feminist politics.

India was, therefore, not simply an adventurous interlude before Steinem’s “real” career began. It was one of the places in which that career became intellectually possible. In student rooms, railway carriages and villages divided by caste violence, she learned that political action begins with proximity: Going where people live, hearing experiences that established institutions disregard and allowing those experiences to reshape the terms of debate.

Steinem, who died on September 2, at the age of 92, became famous for her writing, speeches and public presence. Beneath that visibility, however, lay a quieter political discipline. Listen before prescribing. Treat testimony as knowledge. Build authority collectively. The lessons she encountered in India became central to how she practised feminism and to the movement she helped create.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Mousumi Roy, columnist, politics, culture and economic history.