Gloria Steinem

Perhaps the most well known and highly respected feminist in American history, journalist, author, and activist Gloria Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio. A keen student with a passion for social change, after graduating from Smith College, Steinem received the Chester Bowles Fellowship and spent two years in India working as a Law Clerk to Mehr Chand Mahajan and then to the Chief Justice, and she would maintain personal and professional ties to the nation for the rest of her life. Despite facing regular sexism in the journalism industry of the early 1960s, Steinem's early outings as a writer regularly earned praise-particularly when she went undercover working as a "bunny" at the New York Playboy Club, exposing the unfair and often unethical practices that went on there in an expose written for Show magazine. After attending a pro-choice forum in 1969, Steinem had a revelatory experience about the enormity of difficulty women faced in society, and directed herself stridently towards feminist causes in both her writing and her activism. She co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. with Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 1972, and henceforth campaigned heavily for both feminist causes and civil rights in addition to her writing. In the 1980s, Steinem began to more often publish her thoughts and experiences in the form of books, earning particular accolades for 1982's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions and 1992's Revolution from Within. Steinem would remain just as relevant and active in the ensuing decades, lending support to international and intersectional causes, and publishing several more books including Doing Sixty & Seventy and My Life on the Road.