We note the passing of Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist writer and activist who died this week at 92.
Steinem’s father, Leo Steinem, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland, and her grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a significant figure in her own right: an educator and suffragist who came to the United States from a Reform Jewish family, and who in 1904 became the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education.
Pauline Steinem was active for many years in Jewish communal life, serving as president of the Toledo section of the National Council of Jewish Women and as a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women in Switzerland. As the Nazi regime took hold in the 1930s, she also worked to help relatives in Europe emigrate to safety. Gloria Steinem later spoke of coming to understand her grandmother’s activism and heritage more fully as she got older, and described identifying as Jewish “wherever there is antisemitism”.
Gloria Steinem’s own decades of work reshaped debates on gender equality, reproductive rights and social justice in the United States and beyond, leaving a legacy that reaches far past any single community.
Images: Wiki
