They came “to end the war”, planning to walk across the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea – a symbolic gesture aimed at persuading the two countries to embark on a new era of harmony and forgiveness.
Although the march by 30 international women’s activists turned into a bus ride and they were accused of whitewashing North Korea’s human-rights abuses, their honorary co-chair, Gloria Steinem, declared this week’s action – coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the peninsula’s division – a “triumph”.
At 81, the feminist icon shows no signs of slowing down. Steinem is still a consulting editor for Ms, the magazine she co-founded in 1971. She is still travelling, if not at the hectic pace she once maintained. She is still writing, lecturing, commentating and lobbying on the issues she holds dear. And she is still angry – particularly with those who claim feminism has passed its use-by date. "I'm old, but the movement is young," the award-winning writer, public intellectual and human-rights activist told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. "Every social-justice movement has to last at least 100 years or it doesn't really get absorbed into society. We're only 30 or 40 years into this."
While society has changed immeasurably since she challenged it head-on in the 1970s and 80s, Steinem – probably the world’s most influential women’s-rights campaigner – believes there is much left to achieve.
As well as lingering inequities in pay and in the division of household and child-rearing tasks, she cites domestic violence, child abuse, workplace sexual harassment, pornography, sex trafficking, female genital mutilation and the under-representation of women in government and in other positions of power.
These were among the issues tackled by Ms, the first magazine run solely by women. The preview issue sold out in eight days and Ms had a circulation of 500,000 within five years. Steinem was at the helm until 1987, juggling her editing duties with a punishing schedule of fundraising and lobbying, which kept her almost perpetually on planes and on the road.
Yet, the woman who became a household name and changed the lives of generations of women was oblivious to the “sexual caste system”, as Steinem described patriarchal society, until she attended a meeting in New York in 1969 of women recounting their experiences of illegal abortion.
That epiphany came at the age of 35, and followed a difficult and impoverished childhood overshadowed by the crippling mental illness of her mother, Ruth, a former teacher and journalist.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, Steinem spent her early years travelling the country in a trailer from which her father, Leo, an antiques salesman, plied his wares. Thanks to their itinerant lifestyle, she did not attend a full year of school until she was 12, by which time her parents had divorced and Steinem had been left to care single-handedly for her bed-bound mother in a run-down farmhouse.
Despite that unpropitious start, after leaving high school she won a place at the prestigious Smith College in Massachusetts, where she majored in government and graduated in 1956 magna cum laude (with great praise), and then was awarded a fellowship to study in India.
Returning to the US, Steinem worked as a freelance journalist but found herself pigeonholed into writing about “fashion and food and make-up and babies, or, the low point of my life, textured stockings”.
Her 1963 Playboy investigation, published in Show magazine after she went undercover as a nightclub bunny, brought her notoriety. However, it was not until the creation in 1968 of New York Magazine, which she helped establish and for which she wrote The City Politic column, that she gained a foothold in serious journalism. (Male colleagues told her she wrote "like a man", intending that as a compliment.)
Steinem had always been passionate about progressive causes, championing African-American civil rights and marching against the Vietnam War. But, although women such as Betty Friedan had been campaigning since the 1960s, it was only at the abortion meeting that Steinem was struck by the social and cultural barriers preventing women becoming “full human beings”.
“For me it was like a big light coming on,” she said. “I had identified with every other social justice movement first. I think that often happens to women: we identify with other underdogs, even if we don’t know why.”
Steinem, who set out her views in a 1969 article, After Black Power, Women's Liberation, had discovered her calling. In 1971, with Friedan and other feminists such as Bella Abzug, she founded the National Women's Political Caucus, dedicated to getting more women into office. Later that year, Ms was launched.
With her quick wit, talent and glamorous good looks, Steinem became the new face of the emerging "second-wave" feminist movement (the first wave being the struggle for the vote) – much to the chagrin of the less photogenic Friedan, who had written a seminal book, The Feminist Mystique, in 1963.
Friedan, who turned against her, was not her only detractor. One writer called Steinem “the mini-skirted pin-up girl of the intelligentsia”. The late US TV talk-show host David Susskind said: “You feel like either kissing her or hitting her, I can’t decide which.” The media focused relentlessly on her private life, even linking her (erroneously) with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Steinem was undeterred. Although she claimed to be terrified by public speaking, she crisscrossed the country, addressing conferences, community meetings and college campuses. She co-founded organisations such as the Women’s Action Alliance, a national information centre, and the Ms Foundation for Women. She worked for Democratic candidates such as Robert Kennedy and George McGovern.
And she wrote prolifically: columns, features, profiles and – beginning in 1983 with Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, a collection of her essays and interviews – best-selling books.
Steinem also became known for her one-liners. “If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the shoe?” she demanded. Told at her 40th birthday party that she didn’t look her age, she responded: “This is what 40 looks like.” However, the quotation most often attributed to her – “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” – was coined by the Australian writer Irina Dunn, as she was quick to point out.
Steinem’s life has not been all about work and the women’s movement, though. She was a gifted tap-dancer and loved parties. She had a string of boyfriends and got married, at 66, to the environmental activist David Bale. Tragically, he died of brain cancer three years later. A breast-cancer survivor herself, Steinem denied that she had sold out by signing up for an institution she had spent decades attacking – marriage.
An intensely private woman, Steinem has made herself public property for 45 years. Some remark on her distant manner, others note her humour, compassion and courage. Marianne Schnall, founder of Feminist.com, calls her “a very committed mentor, who has nurtured and supported many young women”.
Steinem appears to care little for material things, occupying the same modest Manhattan apartment for decades. Her fridge is usually empty, and she admits that she lived in the flat “for at least four or five years before I found out the oven didn’t work”.
Some find her just too perfect. The American gossip columnist Liz Smith complained in 1971: “It’s like getting a message from Gandhi ... Gloria has all the irritating qualities of a saint.” Others roll their eyes at her tendency to see everything through a feminist prism. “Politics is just unequal power ... who does the dishes is political,” she once observed.
It was the same this week, when Steinem compared citizens of the two Koreas to victims of domestic violence and said that she and her fellow activists could use their life experience as nurturers to give Koreans “proof of a humane alternative”.
She has, though, helped to change the world – a reality reflected in her numerous awards and honours, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed by President Obama in 2013, and the endowing last year of a chair (of media, cultural and feminist studies) in her name by Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Still a powerful voice on issues of equality, Steinem has no plans to retire. She is closely involved with organisations including the Women’s Media Center, which she co-founded in 2004. She has inspired a hashtag on Twitter (#WWGD – What Would Gloria Do”) and has a book about her life on the road due later this year.
"Retire from what?" she asked, in the 2011 Los Angeles Times interview. "I don't have a job. It would be like retiring from life!"
