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The activist’s memoir, due to be published this month, now stands as a posthumous testament to her remarkable life
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Books — Emma Brockes
Gloria Steinem was due to speak at a women’s lunch in New York at the end of this month and at more events in October, illustrating the central theme of An Unexpected Life, her new memoir, which, when it’s published a few weeks from now, will stand as posthumous testament to the 92-year-old icon: just keep going. So it is, after her death on Wednesday , that the book’s opening pages unfold with a deep, added poignancy and when Steinem expresses gratitude for a life that has been both happier and longer “than I ever imagined”, one is struck by the greater gratitude we probably owe her.
An Unexpected Life is a follow-up of sorts to My Life on the Road , the activist’s memoir of a decade ago, and as the tributes pour in, the book offers us an opportunity to go back over Steinem’s hardscrabble origins in Toledo, Ohio, and the roots of her activism. This is where it all happened, the formation of a woman who would come to define second wave feminism by combining a tough-as-they-come stance with something that looked a lot like serenity. Reading the first half of the book, one is reminded of Steinem’s original power and the improbability and iconoclasm of her journey, in which a childhood governed by poverty and dysfunction turned into a lifelong mission to resist the narrow templates laid out for her.
It’s a cracking backstory. Steinem’s rackety father was a travelling salesman of sorts, touring the country with a dance pavilion that saw Steinem spend long stretches of her childhood with him on the road, which, she writes, conditioned her to enjoy a similarly unconventional existence in adulthood. When she was at home, the young Steinem was a carer for her increasingly mentally unwell mother, who was frequently to be found wandering the town in her nightdress, and Steinem writes movingly about what it is to grow up ashamed of your house and your family. “I learned I could survive almost anything,” she writes, “including a sad mother who was called the Crazy Lady of the neighborhood. We are all one human family, and we are responsible for one another.”
Raised on instability, Steinem grew up remarkably free of the pressure weighing on most of her female peers to knuckle down into conventional marriage and motherhood, leaving her free to pursue a life as a freelance writer and, later, an activist. After college, she went to India for two years, a defining period that informed her outlook to the very end, and on return, began her career as a campaigning journalist, which culminated in her co-founding of Ms magazine in 1971 and eventual ascent to the head of the women’s movement.
These periods of her life are well documented. What I found interesting in the book were Steinem’s asides about the cost of pursuing the life she chose. “Though I managed to support myself,” she writes, “I didn’t save money until I was past fifty. I was sure that I’d end up as a bag lady, like women I saw sleeping in subway stations. I used to handle that fear by thinking, It’s a life like any other. I’ll organize the other bag ladies.” She eventually became somewhat financially secure, largely thanks to buying part of a 19th-century brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the beloved home in which she died this week – although a throwaway line towards the end of the book suggests she was still paying off her mortgage well into her 80s, an astonishing fact given her fame.
It is useful to be reminded by Steinem of how bad things were so very recently
Steinem is the real thing, of course; she was never in it for the money. She makes a strong case that she wasn’t in it for the attention, either, although, as a talented speaker and organiser, she drew on great reserves of magnetism that over the years caused her a lot of problems with jealousy from within the movement, and condescension from without. Right until the end, Steinem was stewarding large groups of women – famous and otherwise – at “talking circles” in her house and putting herself at the centre of a conversation she had in some ways begun.
A big strand of these debates was the shoe-horning of women into flat, unfulfilled lives, which they are conditioned to believe are the only desirable option. This is where the book’s startling honesty comes into play, a habit Steinem seems to have had from the get-go. Some years after graduating, she wrote to her Smith College classmates in an alumni newsletter: “I’m quite broke, not at all who I thought I would be – and consciously happy.”
She writes powerfully about women who made different, unhappier choices under pain of social death: “I remember one woman, married to a socially acceptable man much older than she, who explained, ‘After he dies, I’ll be free.’ The cost of freedom seemed to mean she was able to live only in the future.” It is useful to be reminded of how bad things were so very recently. As the book informs us, “in the 1960s Columbia Law School had a 5% quota for women” – in an era in which American women were earning, on average, 59 cents on each dollar earned by men. (“Now,” she writes, “they typically earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. At the going rate, it will be fifty years before we reach parity overall, and seventy-five years for African American women to reach parity with African American men.”)
There are glowing, drive-by sketches of some of the famous figures Steinem encountered on the road, including James Baldwin and Annie Leibovitz. She is disinclined to offer anything but praise for the people she admires and so the book’s only waspish assessment is reserved for Andy Warhol, whose smirking sensibility really flies up Steinem’s nose and sits poorly alongside her earnestness. I like her for this – having a crack at the immensely irritating Warhol, about whom, she sniffs, “It seems a low point of the art world that Andy Warhol’s is considered valuable.”
As we enter the post-Steinem era – a statement that seems outlandish, given the length and ardour of her service – it’s a pleasure, simply, to spend time in her company, and her role as an elder is one she takes seriously, evoking her deep relationship with Native Americans as the basis for many of her insights. “The patriarchal nuclear family, the one that we are supposed to think is the only kind of family, is really only about 150 years old, and almost entirely a function of industrialization and capitalism.”
It wasn’t until she was much older, she writes, that she realised so much of her life “was spent doing what was expected of me, and not enough doing what I loved”. Counterintuitively, this included her hard line on marriage, which she set herself against as a matter of principle, only marrying her great love, David Bale, at 66 and staying with him until he died three years later. This is the old Steinem we love, the combination of absolute force and, hard on its heels, admission of error.
After all the doubt and indecision, Steinem at 92 had a very clear idea of what she was supposed to be doing, and my God she did it right to the end. “My role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come, and with age comes the responsibility to keep learning. As Robert Browning wrote: ‘The best is yet to be, / The last of life, / for which the first was made.’” Or as Steinem put it, with a hard-won smile it’s impossible to resist, “Now even my jeans are much older than many people I work with.” We should all be so lucky; what a life.
• An Unexpected Life by Gloria Steinem is published by Ebury in the UK and Random House in the US. To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.
An Unexpected Life is a follow-up of sorts to My Life on the Road , the activist’s memoir of a decade ago, and as the tributes pour in, the book offers us an opportunity to go back over Steinem’s hardscrabble origins in Toledo, Ohio, and the roots of her activism. This is where it all happened, the formation of a woman who would come to define second wave feminism by combining a tough-as-they-come stance with something that looked a lot like serenity. Reading the first half of the book, one is reminded of Steinem’s original power and the improbability and iconoclasm of her journey, in which a childhood governed by poverty and dysfunction turned into a lifelong mission to resist the narrow templates laid out for her.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Emma Brockes. Published 3 Sept 2026, 02:16 pm.
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