The second and youngest daughter of Ruth (nee Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem died Wednesday, September 2, at her home in New York City. Gloria Marie Steinem was born to the couple on March 25, 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, becoming the younger sister of Susan Steinem Patch. She had no brothers. 

The northwest Ohio city of Toledo stands approximately 200 miles away from my childhood home in southwest Ohio, and in many respects (in the 1930s through ‘50s at least) worlds away from the Big Apple that Ms. Steinem chose to bite, if you will, and eventually make her home. The New York Times was among scores of news outlets informing readers that Ms. Steinem died peacefully at her upper East Side apartment at the age of 92. The Times and countless other sources have since described in detail her long career and the causes she embraced, noting her work as a magazine writer, journalist, and leading women’s rights activist.

Steinem’s storied career includes work in the late 1950s and early 1960s as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. She also worked in a separate undercover role in 1963 as a Playboy Bunny at the New York City Playboy Club. Steinem’s ensuing exposé of the exploitative and demeaning nature of work at Playboy fueled her then-intensifying indignation at the sexual demands placed on women, their long work hours and meager compensation, and the vulnerability of young mothers poorly treated or completely abandoned by the fathers of their children.

As a young girl, Steinem certainly would have learned hard lessons about vulnerability. An online biography notes that her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, had rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust. Gloria’s father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Germany and Poland, and had worked as a “roaming” antiques dealer while the family lived and traveled in a trailer. Steinem’s parents separated in 1944 and divorced the following year under the strain of her mother’s mental health battles, which included long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill.

Letty Cottin Porgrebin, who co-founded MS Magazine in 1971 with Steinem, writes that Steinem’s journalistic coverage of a public hearing on abortion was “the turning point” that “radicalized” Steinem’s perception of what makes an issue “serious” and propelled her towards the “Second Wave” women’s movement of the 1970s. (First Wave feminism is that associated with the late 19th century/early 20th century women’s suffrage movement). 

Second Wave or “Radical feminism” included elements of both fury and folderol, such as bra burning and songs that ranged from joyless views of marriage to defiant proclamations of women’s strength and independence. (For a later counterview, check out this sleeper hit sung by Motown veteran Charlene). A primary and substantial aim of Second Wave or 1970s-era feminism, however, was expanding access to and utilization of contraceptives, removing all obstacles to abortion on demand, and redefining legalized abortion as a fundamental expression of women’s liberation and “right to choose.”

Elective abortion is a choice Steinem herself made at the age of 23, and in 2015, she dedicated her then newly published memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to the London-based Dr. John Sharpe, who had helped her obtain an illegal abortion. In subsequent years, Steinem rooted her support for legalized abortion in language about the right of women to “power over our own bodies,” going so far as to assert that “opposing women’s right to control our own bodies is always the first step in every authoritarian regime” (Al Jazeera 2019).

Yet Steinem also chafed at the notion of being considered “pro”-abortion. “Nobody would choose one if they didn’t have to,” she said as recently as 2019, and previously, “Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I think I’ll have an abortion. It’s a pleasurable experience.’” Unwittingly, with such comments, Steinem conceded that women do not actually choose abortion, but resort to it. Sadly and ironically, this staunch feminist, who together with her sisters-in-arms prided a movement on the rights, dignity and well-being of women, remained focused on promoting ever wider access to abortion — a “Final Solution” so to speak — versus life-giving options for women in distress.

Recent tributes to Ms. Steinem offer no insight as to why Ruth and Leo Steinem graced their baby daughter with the exultant name “Gloria Marie.” My reflections this week upon this fellow Ohioan who left for the Big Apple and fought for legalized abortion got me thinking of another gloried Marie, honored in both the Bible and the Qur’an — and sometimes described as the new Eve: “Hail full of grace the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou among women” reads Luke 1:26-28. The Surah Maryam describes Maryam [Mary] as “one of the best women to ever live” and notes that she and her son Isa [Jesus] “were among the few humans protected from Satan’s touch at birth.” Satan is noted in both texts’ Genesis accounts as offering Eve an apple – a fruit embodying false promises (the little apple bearing a Big Lie). Mary/Maryam, in contrast to Eve, stands as a model to Christian and Muslim women alike of adherence to truth, strength in difficulty and temptation, and the fruitfulness of life-giving love.

As I ponder such things, and the early life of Gloria Marie Steinem — from her absent father and lack of brothers to the turbulent decades in which she lived — I can understand, to a great degree, her Second Wave American feminism and embrace of the false promises of legalized abortion. I likewise can understand the Southeast Asian feminism, if you will, of Malala Yousafzai, whose father is clearly a positive influence in her life, and that of award-winning film director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who produced the unforgettable documentaries “Saving Face” (2012) and “A Girl in the River” (2015). Certainly, many women worldwide have experienced and witnessed horrific assaults on the rights and dignity of women, as well as the sort of loss, hardship, and deprivation experienced by a very young Gloria Steinem. 

It is little wonder that these women have made women’s rights their life’s work. But as for Steinem’s lifelong advocacy of legalized abortion, in which she was joined by such famous U.S. feminists as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Sarah Weddington and others, it is much harder to understand how an otherwise intelligent woman could be so impervious to the truth that the ends do not justify the means.

Those seven words stopped me in my tracks as a pre-teen in 1974, and hearing hardcore feminists of the time lament the plight of “unwanted children,” once asked my mother if maybe sometimes some children might be better off if they were not born. It was a test balloon question, and I wanted a rebuttal of pro-choice advocates’ seductive utilitarian reasoning. My mother — whose name was Mary and who was in my estimation “one of the best women to ever live” — needed only those seven words to eviscerate the flawed reasoning of Steinem, Abzug, and company.

Two years later, my oldest sister (another Mary!) would encounter pro-abortion feminists such as Abzug as fellow participants of the 1977 National Women’s Conference, held in Houston in observance of International Women’s Year. Then a newly minted Juris Doctor awaiting results from the Ohio bar exam, Mary eventually became the first woman elected to Ohio’s 2nd District Court of Appeals. Neither my brilliant mother nor equally brilliant sister would be strangers to hardship, loss, and occasional experiences of misogyny and chauvinism. But the model that they and women like them have given me is that of a truly authentic feminism, open to life and rooted in the unique genius and equality we women have as women — not as women affixed in resentful opposition to men or insistent on “checking one’s womb at the door” in order to advance.

I wish for the late Gloria Steinem and other late American feminists like her the peace and fuller understanding of self that eluded her in this lifetime. And I wish for all women many more such Mary/Maryam-like examples of femininity, virtue, and strength, wherever in the world they might be.

Teresa A. Donovan, MPH, is senior communications and policy advisor for the new Science Alliance for Life & Technology, an associate scholar of the Washington, D.C.-based Charlotte Lozier Institute, and former senior writer and editor of Presidential Messages & Correspondence for President George H.W. Bush (GB41). She also served more than 20 years higher education, including work focused on environmental and public health sciences at the University of Kentucky and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine|UC Center for Environmental Genetics.