Gloria Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. magazine and one of the most recognized figures of American feminism, died Wednesday at age 92. While many mainstream outlets have praised her as a pioneering voice for women, critics are pushing back hard against what they call an incomplete and misleading portrait of her legacy, particularly her decades-long advocacy for abortion.
The Atlantic this week described Steinem’s work as “feminism for all,” a characterization that critics, including commentary published by The Federalist, argue ignores her record of dismissing marriage, motherhood, and traditional family structures throughout her career. Steinem once said, “You become a semi-non person when you get married,” and referred to the “patriarchal, nuclear family” as an invention of “industrialization and capitalism.”
Steinem’s history includes stints as an undercover Playboy Bunny for a magazine assignment and past collaboration with the CIA. She also dismissed research into biological sex differences, once calling it “the remnant of anti-American crazy thinking,” and argued, “we badly need to raise our boys more like our girls.”
A Career Built Around Abortion Advocacy
Throughout her public life, Steinem was a consistent and vocal advocate for abortion access. She co-founded and served on the board of Choice USA, now known as Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE), an organization that describes its mission as envisioning “a liberated world where we can live with justice, love freely, express our gender and sexuality, and define and create families of our choosing.” She spent much of her career lobbying and fundraising for abortion causes.
“It took us a while to figure out but patriarchy – or whatever you want to call it, the systems that say there’s masculine and feminine and other bullsh-t – is about controlling reproduction. Every economics course ought to start not with production but with reproduction. It is way more important,” Steinem said more than a decade before her death.
At the 1977 National Women’s Conference, Steinem remarked, “Women are always saying, ‘We can do anything that men can do,’ but men should be saying, ‘We can do anything that women can do.'” Critics point to this and similar statements as evidence of a contradiction at the heart of her philosophy: that female equality, in her framing, ultimately depended on the ability to end a pregnancy.
Steinem herself once said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” In one interview, she went further, suggesting that more abortions would have helped address what she called the world’s “climate problems.”
Her Own Abortion
Steinem had an illegal abortion at age 22, an experience she described in 2011 as “the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life.” She added, “I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive.” She dedicated her 2015 book, My Life on the Road, to the London doctor who performed the procedure.
Steinem also frequently argued that society pressured women into passivity. “It’s not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There’s opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine,” she said.
A Divided Reckoning
Steinem is being remembered by many major outlets as a hero and lifelong crusader for reproductive rights, credited with popularizing terms like “reproductive freedom.” But critics, including writers at The Federalist, argue that framing overlooks the documented physical and emotional toll abortion can take on women, and contend that treating pregnancy as an obstacle to overcome rather than a role to be valued reflects a narrower, more transactional view of womanhood than her admirers acknowledge.
Steinem had no children. Her death has left commentators across the political spectrum weighing in on what her life’s work says about the different paths women have taken in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and fulfillment.
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