British Vogue - 09.2019

Pride of place

Robin Muir looks back at a portrait of Gloria Steinem,

taken in her New York apartment by Horst, Vogue January 1971

G

loria Steinem’s life has been dedicated to women’s

rights. She’s been an activist for so long that the

accolades showered upon her began several decades

ago and show little sign of letting up. Her induction

into the National Women’s Hall of Fame took place in

1993, and she’s since received an honorary degree from Yale

University, a professorial chair endowed in her name at

Rutgers, and, in 2013, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,

America’s highest civilian award, given to her by Barack

Obama. So culture-defining was Steinem that, as early as

1979, she was part of a Supersisters set of children’s trading

cards (placed at number 32 out of 72). And when the Ms

Foundation makes its annual awards, it hands out... “Glorias”.

Steinem’s first major article as a journalist was a 1962

piece on contraception for Esquire, and she’s wielded her

pen like a scalpel ever since. Her wit is legendary: “A liberated

woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”

“If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?” And the

only occasion to forgo a short skirt? “A blizzard.”

This black-and-white portrait was published in British

Vogue in 1971. (That year, Steinem would co-found Ms

magazine, 300,000 test copies of which sold out within days.)

The Vogue article was a self-penned interiors piece that shed

a little light on her private world. The two-room apartment

in a New York brownstone took Steinem a year to find. A

“sleeping balcony” allowed her to use one room as an office

and another corner for “the sit-down dinners I never give”.

Her friend, Warhol “superstar” Jane Holzer, helped her with

the decor. “If I’m smiling,” she said, “it’s because I have a

grown-up apartment at last.” She’s still living there, and now

owns other units in the same building.

Today, Hollywood has caught up with America’s favourite

feminist icon. Next year brings Julie Taymor’s film of Steinem’s

memoir My Life on the Road (with two Glorias: Alicia

Vikander and Julianne Moore), and after that is An Uncivil

Wa r, Dee Rees’s biopic of Steinem’s early 1970s campaign

to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. After half a century,

the relevance of this force for change marches briskly on. n

“A liberated

woman is

one who has

sex before

marriage

and a

job af ter”

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