Hurt child to feminist icon: The extraordinary, complicated story of Gloria Steinem

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : As such, it helped embolden women as they fought blatant discrimination and harassment in the workplace and unspoken oppression, and sometimes outright abuse, at home.
55% : Significantly, she also wanted to expand the movement beyond the white, middle-class housewives of its early days - those inspired by The Feminine Mystique - to include younger women, working women and women of color, as well as lesbians and other marginalised groups.
52% : The Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination on account of sex, was belatedly ratified but is still not part of the Constitution.
48% : The two shared certain goals, including equal pay, more women in public office and legalised abortion.
48% : (She later supported lesbian rights.)
46% : Friedan saw the focus on sexual politics as a distraction and famously warned that including lesbians (the "lavender menace") threatened the movement's goal of achieving mainstream acceptance.
43% : She managed to get an abortion.
42% : And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women's magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work.
42% : The 1973 Supreme Court decision legalising abortion, a central goal of the movement, was overturned in 2022; some states went on to reverse or curtail other hard-won reproductive rights.
42% : Angered that they had been made to feel like criminals, Steinem, who had had a secret abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first openly feminist essay, titled "After Black Power, Women's Liberation".
37% : She and other single women were caricatured as man-hating, bra-burning lesbians intent on upending the social order and destroying the American family.
33% : It also notably featured a signed list of 53 well-known women who acknowledged that they had sought illegal abortions - among them, tennis star Billie Jean King, singer Judy Collins, playwright Lillian Hellman and historian Barbara Tuchman.
32% : Her own feminist awakening didn't come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a "speak out" of women discussing their illegal abortions.
30% : She was jolted into feminism that year when she reported on a group of women in Greenwich Village discussing their illegal abortions.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.