I’m trying to remember the first time I heard about Gloria Steinem.
It may have been from her article about working as a Playboy bunny, which made a big splash in 1963. I used to babysit for a family across the street from us in Cincinnati. By local standards, they were very sophisticated. The husband was possibly the only non-Catholic in the area, and if I had more time I’d tell you about the day when his friendly neighbors went over to celebrate his birthday by giving him the best gift they could think of — a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
OK, not going there. During one of my babysitting nights I came across a magazine that included Gloria’s Bunny piece. Back then, people regarded the scantily clad Playboy Club waitresses as either wildly glamorous or wildly sinful. My neighborhood was in the sinful camp, but reading Gloria’s piece as a teenager, I was struck by how she mixed the sexism of the customers with the meanness of the owners, who expected their girls to be fun and attractive while working them very hard in very high heels.
I got to know Gloria pretty well later, and I loved the way she mixed you-can-do-anything feminism with a talent for looking really good without appearing to be making any effort. When people asked how she could be so glamorous at, say, 40, she’d just say, “This is what 40 looks like,” and so on down the line to 50, 60 — you get the idea.
It was a new way of thinking about age, particularly for women. I remember listening, when I was a kid, to one of my mother’s favorite radio soap operas, “The Romance of Helen Trent.” It was, the announcer solemnly began, a saga about a heroine who, “when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair, fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is 35 or more, romance in life need not be over.”
Gloria was the epitome of an openness to getting older. I know she was hoping to make it to the moment when she could announce, “This is what 100 looks like.” I was hoping I could be around to listen and imagine the possibility of doing something similar. Not, Lord knows, to match her age-defying appearance, but of moving on the way she had — doing whatever she could to be useful and supportive to the people and causes she loved.
And having fun doing it. There was a time when much of the world regarded the women’s movement leaders as a cadre of killjoys, out to destroy all the old-fashioned pleasures of dating, sex and marriage. But Gloria’s feminism didn’t keep her from having a social life and attending to her appearance — the hair and the eyes and the always-attractive-but-not-fussy clothes. Thank heavens. It made the whole movement look stronger, replacing the early vision of women’s rights as something appealing only to females who weren’t good-looking enough to get a full life the usual way. One of Gloria’s contributions to feminism was helping to kill the killjoy thing.
“I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’” she told me when she turned 80. “First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.” She celebrated in Botswana.
By then, she admitted, her libido had pretty much faded. But she found a bright side — not thinking about sex would leave her more time for other stuff. (“The brain cells that used to be obsessed,” she pointed out, “are now free for all kinds of great things.”)
She was fun to hang around with. I used to invite her to the columnists’ Valentine’s Day party at The Times, and she came even when her back was giving her too much pain to stand around sipping a drink. So she always sat on a couch in the middle of the room, and my husband, Dan, always stayed alert for a time when she didn’t have a companion, so he could zip over to keep her entertained. Never knew whether it was a high point of her social calendar, but it definitely was for Dan.
Wow, hard to believe Gloria’s gone. Missing her already.
Gail Collins, a contributing Opinion writer, worked for The Times for 30 years, as a member of the editorial board, as the editorial page editor and as an Opinion columnist from 2007 until 2025.
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