The passing of Gloria Steinem has launched a thousand obituaries, and almost everyone calls her the face of feminism. Her aviator sunglasses, centre-parted hair, and lean frame became synonymous with the movement in America. But it is a description she would have resented, having spent nearly 50 years trying to dismantle it.

In her final interview in February 2025 for Netflix’s Famous Last Words, she said, “I hope I wasn’t the face of the feminist movement because it’s not right. It’s a diverse movement… [My fame] has more to do with endurance … because I’ve just lasted longer.”

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This paradox — of a face that both launched and limited her career — was established early on. At 28, she answered a Playboy Club ad calling for “attractive young girls” and went undercover for 11 days. Her exposé brought to light the exploitation and low pay the women endured. It remains one of the most influential pieces of journalism to this day. But editors refused to hire her. “We don’t want a pretty girl,” she later recalled being told. She ended up regretting the piece for the damage it did to her reputation as a serious journalist, but she had the last laugh as her piece outlived the Playboy clubs.

Did her telegenic face make her more palatable to the masses despite her “radical” ideas? Sure. But being the face came at a steep cost. Critics dismissed her as a “miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia”, while the right attacked her for destroying the family. The left found her too mainstream, too palatable. Being the face meant that her views were taken to be the views of the entire movement, and she received immense flak for defending US President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The same visibility that made her a symbol also made her a target.

But the most significant impact of her journey was helping usher in an internal revolution. In 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out in a Greenwich Village basement where 12 women testified about their illegal abortions. Steinem sat in the audience, holding a secret of her own — she had had an abortion at 22 and had told no one. That day, she experienced what she would later call, in her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road, a “click of consciousness — namely, that I had been silent and silenced.”

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That “click of consciousness” was a call to action. She went on to co-found Ms. magazine in 1972. At a time when women’s publications survived on advertising from fashion, beauty, and food companies — and editorial content that praised them in return — Ms. refused to play along.

Advertisers were not pleased. When Steinem met Leonard Lauder, CEO of Estée Lauder, he told her that Ms. readers “aren’t our women”. His company, he explained, was selling “a kept-woman mentality”. Estée Lauder, ironically, was founded by his mother who had built a global cosmetics empire.

This defiance of commercial expectations was an act of principle, but the true measure of its success was found on the open road. Steinem recalls an incident in her memoir about an elderly woman who approached her at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota. She pointed to a purple Harley and said: “That’s mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners… I even put ‘Ms.‘ on my license plate —and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”

The writer is copy editor,

aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com