Gloria Steinem—the era-defining feminist activist, journalist, author, and organizer—has passed away, according to a statement from her foundation. She was 92.

Here, we revisit a profile of Steinem by Liz Smith, titled “Coming of Age in America,” originally published in the June 1971 issue of Vogue.

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Around Gloria Steinem, there’s a subtle glow of passionate intensity that comes from someone deeply committed to a cause—someone who can’t be bought or pushed around, and who has turned away from conventional rewards. Gloria carries an air of imminent excitement—at any moment, she might break loose, grab a rope, and drive the money changers out of the temple, fighting for women, lettuce workers, grape pickers, Black Panthers, peace activists, draft resisters, the racially marginalized, or anyone she sees as disenfranchised or underprivileged.

“Gloria is my symbol of the modern woman. Intelligent, beautiful, and idealistic. She’s thought through the way she wants to live and acts on it.” —Clay S. Felker, editor, New York magazine

“You know that guy in Chicago who killed all those nurses? That’s Gloria—the Richard Speck of the Radical Left.” —Al Capp, cartoonist/columnist

“Miss Steinem is a political analyst of sharp insight and influence.” —Newsweek

“If you were a man, I’d hit you right in the mouth!” —Hans Conried, actor, to Gloria Steinem on a television talk show

Aside from a few detractors like Al Capp and Hans Conried, the general consensus—even among those who see the Women’s Liberation movement as an unpleasant toad—is that Gloria Steinem is the shining jewel in its crown. When Gloria stands up to deliver her “Fundamental Revolution” speech, eyes glaze over with admiration.

Gloria figuratively knocked down the tough reporter Pete Hamill like a modern-day Saul on the road to Damascus. Pete was on his way to persecuting the “Christians,” so to speak, but Gloria turned him into a regular Paul, and now he’s a supporter of Women’s Lib.

“I was slow to catch on: I’m Irish, you know. I couldn’t handle the Ti-Grace Atkinsons, and so, like a lot of men, I tended to downplay the movement. But Gloria explained it. Her perspective is breaking down a lot of these crazy barriers. She’s the best spokesperson the movement could ever have, because it’s not like she’s into some kind of weird public therapy when she speaks.”

Gloria appreciates Pete, but not such compliments and distinctions. She believes the movement is breaking down barriers between women of all kinds—between the beautiful and the plain, the married and the single, the old and the young, and, surprisingly, between middle-class suburban housewives and lower-income Black women. She says she’s even learned to stop reacting to the occasional fearful man who assumes any Women’s Lib member is a lesbian. (“If one reacts in a shocked, defensive way, saying, ‘Well, I’m not gay and I can prove it!’ she’s just condemning her lesbian sisters in and out of the movement. Women who are lesbians face double discrimination. And the movement is for all women. If I’m happy as I am, why should I feel threatened at being called something I’m not, or put lesbians down by acting offended?”)

Why is Gloria Steinem so effective? For one thing, she’s a beautiful person, both in the literal and figurative senses.

She’s already made it in the world and doesn’t need recognition, so her integrity is largely unquestioned. The attractive, eligible men in her life dispel any notion that she might be—well, you know, not normal. She speaks softly and looks as cool, effortless, and unhurried as a rich girl at a fraternity picnic. But that’s an illusion—she’s burning for causes, dying inside from stage fright, and weighed down by the care that comes from taking on too much.

Gloria Steinem is a good writer (her socio-political articles for the weekly magazine New York won a Penney-Missouri MagaTwo: Show Business Loses a Star to College.

“My mother sold our family’s old house, which somehow made it possible for me to go to Smith,” Gloria said. “You can’t imagine what a revelation college life was. People lived in houses, had jobs, took naps! I was full of silly little desires back then, wishing I had money or a better social standing. I had this schoolgirl crush on the middle class. I loved Smith. They gave me all the books I could read and fed me three meals a day. It was like finding a home in the army. I studied government and dreamed of becoming—well, I’m not sure what.”

Take Three: Passage to India.

“Even though I wanted what other girls had, my mind was growing. After I graduated, I went to India on the Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship. That wasn’t so impressive; honestly, hardly anyone wanted it. I lived with Indian families for two years, mostly around Delhi. Seeing how the other half lives cured me forever of wanting to be middle class. Until then, I thought the United States was normal. But when I came home from India, I saw this country as some big frosted cupcake sitting in the middle of starving millions.”

Take Four: Poor Little Match Girl Takes on New York City.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t much fun then. I’d become very serious and academic. After all, that’s what got me out of Toledo.”

This quiet little thing worked for an odd, avant-garde humor magazine called Help! She got rejected by every major magazine: “We don’t hire young girls; we want writers.”

For a friend, Bob Benton—then Esquire’s art director—she started suggesting ideas and wrote several pieces for the magazine that went unsigned and unnoticed. It seemed pointless, but Gloria recalls, “Without Benton, I might never have written anything. He made me see that even my own childhood was interesting.”

“At the time, I was living on about $3,000 a year. I loved clothes but had only one outfit. One day I told Benton, ‘I know how to sew. I could make myself some clothes.’ I’ll never forget it. He stopped, stood there with his hands in his pockets, and just looked at me. Then he said, ‘Who wants a girl who makes her own clothes?’ It’s funny now, but that was the first hint I ever had that I didn’t have to fit some mythical female role I wasn’t suited for. He made me understand I could be loved for who I was, and I’ll always be grateful to him.”

Gloria’s friend Bob Benton and I had gone to college together, and in the late ’50s I saw him often around New York. I was working as a society reporter and thought I was a big deal, gliding along on press-agent hype to a shiny but shallow nowhere.

Whenever we met, Benton always brought this quiet, glasses-wearing girl along. I wondered what a smart art director saw in someone like her. She rarely spoke and was too shy to join in the wild dancing we all did. Still, I liked her well enough and even offered to help her break into what I thought was my “successful” world. She didn’t seem smart enough to take me up on it, so I wrote her off as not very bright.

Much later, I was working on a big charity fashion show at the Waldorf-Astoria. The models were all movie stars or famous names—everyone was someone—and the dress rehearsal was on a grand, Busby Berkeley scale. Suddenly, down the runway came a long-haired girl with a movie star’s mouth and delicate, long-nailed hands spreading out the fabric of her pajamas. I wondered who she was but couldn’t place her.

She walked down the runway as if the steps might vanish beneath her, came toward me, looked at me anxiously, and said, “Liz, don’t you remember me? It’s Gloria—Gloria Steinem.”

By now we’re at Take Five: Bright Butterfly Breaks Out of Her Cocoon—Turns Social Professional Sex-Star Success.I was so overwhelmed by the incredible reality of what had happened, so confused by how wrong I’d been, so completely stunned that all I could say was, “Oh, I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.” She quickly put them on, but she was still beautiful—so different it was hard to believe, yet carrying the same shyness she’d had when she was Benton’s girlfriend. She was working on something called The Beach Book and writing a few magazine pieces. Nothing remarkable.

Nothing remarkable! Before I knew it, Gloria Steinem had become a pop culture icon, right up there with Tom Wolfe and Baby Jane Holzer. I felt a pang of guilt and my pride stung. She wrote a striking piece for Show magazine after going undercover as a Playboy bunny. She was dating director Mike Nichols, and rumors swirled that Ted Sorensen had wanted to marry her. The Beach Book came out with an introduction by John Kenneth Galbraith. Her bylines were popping up everywhere like rapid-fire.

Gloria looks back on this time as a period when “I was always doing everything wrong. The bunny piece, for instance, was a disaster for me. It boxed me into silly, girly topics for years. I reinforced all the problems women face by writing it and letting the fame from it take over.” She adds, “At the time, I guess, like most women, I was sort of looking for the right husband. I went out with Tom Guinzburg (the book publisher) because I adored his family and wanted so badly to be part of something like that. I fell for the glamour and the idea of marrying success rather than achieving it myself. I was brainwashed as a woman. I chased the status, the ‘important’ right man, for all the wrong reasons. It happened with Mike Nichols too—it was my fault for letting it drag on and then fall apart, because I was in it for the wrong reasons. Back then, I was writing about Jacqueline Kennedy, Instant Sociology, movie stars, writers, and pop culture.”

“But things were eating at me. I wanted to write about politics, but nobody would let me. I was starting to meet people I admired in the Kennedy Administration.”

Take Six: Goodbye to All That.

Gloria stopped writing just for money. She tried to downplay her personal publicity. The New York literary crowd grumbled: “She’s just scared that exposing her relationships with Black men might hurt her chances for a future public life.” At The New York Times, they joked, “If she can’t handle the heat, she should stay out of the bedroom.”

Gloria was stung by this: “It’s the press that ‘protects’ me from myself. When I’m photographed with Henry Kissinger, it runs everywhere and turns into a romantic myth—which never happened, of course. But let me be seen with Rafer Johnson, and even though they take pictures, nobody prints them. Well, I’m proud of all my friendships, including the ones they find unacceptable. And since I have no plans to run for office, and wouldn’t change my private life if I did, it’s absurd.” (It must be true; when Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin wanted Gloria on their New York mayoralty ticket, she declined: “That life is too painful for me. I couldn’t handle that kind of responsibility.”)

Take Seven: The Total Commitment.

Whatever was in the air had caught Gloria in return. “Of course, it started for me with President Kennedy’s death. But I didn’t really pull myself together until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That was a war, you know.” She recalls, “There were pools of blood on the sidewalk where police had beaten peace protesters. Nobody had slept in days. Everything was chaos. I’d already had a rough time, because I had to show the R.F.K. memorial film to reporters to stop L.B.J.’s people from keeping it off the convention floor. I sat through it with a lump in my throat. John Kennedy’s death was awful, but it got easier to bear with time. Bobby’s death gets a little harder every day, because we started to see that he had…”She had been the only connection between so many different people.

“I was rushing down the stairs in my hotel, wearing a wrinkled shirt and skirt. I ran into a crowd of Democratic candidates, and a reporter from The Washington Post came straight at me, right in the middle of all that chaos, and asked, ‘Whose shirt are you wearing?’

“I said something like, ‘Get away from me, you damn lady!’ It’s a perfect example of the roles we push on each other—asking pointless questions, holding tea parties in the middle of a battle.”

Gloria, who gets tired of being called efficient and cool, admits she really fell apart later, after ten days on the road with Nixon’s campaign. When asked the question she often poses to others—”Do you cry often?”—she replied, “Not often, but when I do, I can’t stop. I ended my piece on Nixon describing myself in tears, but I toned it down. The truth is, I went back to the press plane and couldn’t stop crying. Kind people tried to comfort me, but I just kept sobbing. My friend Barbara Nessim used to cry every day, but I don’t know how to cry for just a minute. And yes, I’ve cried since then—over a man and a situation I thought was hopeless.”

“Race, economic status, and sexual orientation don’t matter. We’re all women.”

“As for changes in my life, I can’t say I’ve had any big, sudden revelations. The changes came slowly. I didn’t make clear-cut decisions. When I started working for New York magazine, I thought I’d still do plenty of conventional things; then I realized I couldn’t.”

“Many people go through a social-butterfly phase; you’ve got that party scene going for you. You wonder if staying home means missing out. Now I truly don’t care. I’d rather be with my lover, talk to Dorothy, or just be alone. My idea of a perfect evening is sitting at home with someone I love, watching old movies and eating Sara Lee cake.”

“Women’s Liberation means a lot to me, but in some ways it’s just part of life now, not a cause. My own experiences pushed me toward it. I had been rebelling quietly, hoping no one would notice. Then, about two years ago, I went to a meeting of the radical Women’s Lib group Redstockings, held to protest the absurd abortion hearings by the New York State legislature, where fourteen men and a nun were asked to testify. I can’t think of a more moving event—hearing all these women stand up and talk about the shame and danger of getting abortions. After all, one in three American women has one; that’s almost as common as a cold. That meeting made me see that women are oppressed together, so we have to come together. Race, economic status, and sexual orientation don’t matter. We’re all women.”

Gloria sat curled up neatly on the floor of her New York apartment. The living room has a sleeping balcony tucked above a North African-style alcove, all covered in cushioned orange-and-red batik. It’s an exotic space with parquet floors, glass tables, a fireplace, and Gloria’s Indian trinkets scattered about. The rest of the apartment is mostly a study where two phones ring nonstop, books spill over in waves from stacks, and posters of everyone from George Wallace to Isak Dinesen (Gloria’s favorite writer) to Bogart to Che Guevara to Bobby Kennedy line the walls. In one corner is a striking photo of the late senator, warmly inscribed by his wife.

Gloria sat stroking “Crazy Alice,” a big gray cat. Her brown eyes were hidden behind blue glasses. “I just wear these all the time now because I can’t be bothered with my contacts. Any woman who spends more than fifteen minutes getting ready to face the world is just wasting her time.”

When I asked what dress size she wears, she said, “You’d never ask a man his suit size.” When I asked what brand of cigarette she smokes, she said,”Pall Mall—because of the red package.” That told me she’s not some movie star who puts up with being treated like a second-class citizen, and that too many silly interview questions have already been thrown at too many women. But she added, “I don’t inhale.”

Since many people see Gloria as someone on the side of the angels, I wondered which angel might be watching over her. It has to be Anabiel, the one in charge of curing stupidity. I remembered how she questioned Hugh Hefner in a rare interview where her annoyance with him came through in every line. Finally, she asked, “What would you like on your tombstone?”

So I asked her the same thing. A pause. Then, in that unforgettable Ohio accent that’s either captivating or irritating thousands these days: “Oh, I guess, ‘Here lies a good person.’ I mean it in the Jewish sense—a person with a good heart. That’s how I’d like to be remembered, as someone who tried to change things, to leave a little less pain in the world.”

Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the archive piece From the Archives Liz Smith on Gloria Steinems Coming of Age in America

General Background

1 What is this From the Archives article about
Its a reprint of a 1983 column by famous gossip columnist Liz Smith In it she reviews and comments on Gloria Steinems book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions which is a collection of essays about Steinems life the feminist movement and her personal journey

2 Who was Liz Smith
Liz Smith was a legendary American journalist and gossip columnist She was hugely influential in the 1970s and 80s writing about celebrities politics and high society for the New York Daily News and other major papers

3 Who was Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem is a worldfamous feminist journalist and socialpolitical activist She became a leading voice for womens rights in the 1960s and 70s and cofounded Ms magazine

4 What does Coming of Age in America mean in this context
It refers to Steinems personal growth and development as a woman and an activist The article looks at how her early life experiences shaped her into the leader of the feminist movement Its about her intellectual and political awakening

Content Details

5 Does this article reveal any big gossip or secrets about Gloria Steinem
Not in a scandalous way Because Liz Smith was a gossip columnist readers might expect dirt but this piece is more respectful The revelations are more personallike details about Steinems difficult childhood and her early career struggles which she wrote about in her book

6 Im new to feminism Is this a good place to start
Its an interesting historical snapshot but not the best starting point The article assumes you already know who Gloria Steinem is and why shes important If youre new you might want to read a summary of Steinems life first or check out the book Outrageous Acts itself

7 What is the main point Liz Smith is trying to make
Smith is arguing that Steinem is more complex and human than her public image suggests