Gloria Steinem: Under A Wandering Star

At 85, Gloria Steinem has lost none of her passion. Samantha Trenoweth finds the feminist trailblazer still out to change the world.

- Samantha Trenoweth

The sun is setting and New York City’s buildings and pavements are exhaling the heat from a record-breaking autumn day. It’s 6.30pm and Gloria Steinem has thrown open the windows hoping for an evening breeze. Gloria has lived in this leafy Upper East Side street since 1968, when her apartment was rent-controlled and just a single storey with a couple of crowded rooms. It’s expanded over the years. She bought first one apartment, then another, and connected them with a staircase. Today, her “nest” is scattered, as her friend the young actress Emma Watson says, “with sacred objects, talismans, photographs, books,” a Tibetan thangka painting, a vase of flowers, richly coloured weavings and rugs. She has made a home.

When she was younger there would have been a half-packed suitcase in a corner, ready for a fast escape. In those days, Gloria was constantly in motion – organising, speaking, shaping the game-changing Ms. magazine, igniting what became known as second-wave feminism. As she says, “the road felt like home”, perhaps because perpetual motion is in her gene pool. Gloria grew up in Toledo, Ohio, on the western tip of Lake Erie. From her father Leo, she inherited her free spirit, her independence, her propensity to follow a wandering star. From her mother, Ruth, she inherited a love of writing, of literature, of quotable quotes.

Before she married, Ruth had worked as a journalist – no small feat for a woman in the 1920s. She was also an avid reader and a theosophist, inquisitive about both eastern and western spirituality (which Gloria believes accounts for her own cross-cultural agnosticism). “She would wake me in the mornings,” Gloria remembers, “with a poem from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.’”