Founding editor of Ms magazine on Gloria Steinem: ‘The least egomaniacal person’

When an up and coming feminist author and journalist bumped into Gloria Steinem at a women’s conference in Washington DC in 1971 she was awed but also realized she had been on the wrong track by “asking women to adjust” to “a man’s world” rather than organizing to change it, as the more senior activist of the two was doing.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Steinem ended up comparing notes and brainstorming until the wee hours of the following morning and Steinem asked her to come on board with a project she was cooking up – Ms magazine.

Pogrebin became a founding editor of Ms when it launched as an insert to New York magazine that December – with an image in blue of the Hindu goddess Kali, pregnant and juggling time, work, household, appearance etc, with her eight arms, and the strap line: the Housewife’s Moment of Truth.

Then the magazine had its own full debut issue early the following year with the cover blasting out: “Wonder Woman for President”.

“We called it the preview edition because we thought it might be our only issue ever. We had to fight to get it on the news stands because we had to convince distributors that it was news and that there was a women’s movement – called women’s lib back then,” Pogrebin said, after Steinem’s death.

The debut was “stuffed with every possible” relevant topic, Pogrebin said – the concept of an egalitarian marriage, the problems of inequality for women over loans, insurance, credit cards, also articles about household workers, homemakers, job discrimination, “day to day discrimination,”, she said, in a telephone interview on Thursday afternoon.

But the controversial magazine that would focus on putting feminism firmly in the mainstream media for women, discussing abortion rather than recipes, knitting and fashion, sold out in a few days. It powered on through the 70s and 80s and, after many iterations, is still published today.

Pogrebin said she had spent the morning “hysterically crying” after learning of Steinem’s death at 92 at her home in New York but then was spending the afternoon speaking out about her collaborator and good friend of 50-plus years. She described Steinem as “the least egomaniacal person” she knew, and full of empathy – just one of the hundreds of tributes pouring in.

Pogrebin was blown away when she first met Steinem.

“I was a baby feminist. I knew nothing. I had just published my first book, How to Make it in a Man’s World. I was asking women to adjust to [that world] rather than organizing them to change it, which was what Gloria was doing at that time,” she said.

When the two met, Pogrebin was attending the conference that started the National Women’s Political Caucus, founded by Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer and Bella Abzug. She was a sidekick to Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, and came to see how the women’s movement needed many characters for success.

She recalled Steinem’s approach and manner.

“Her magnificent, articulate eloquence, and her beauty – she made feminism, you know, sexy, unthreatening. Because she was always very gentle. Her voice was gentle, she didn’t harangue you like Betty did.”

She added: “We needed a Betty, a raucous, angry woman, no nonsense, a scholar, an academic – PhD, a rabble rouser. And then we needed Gloria who, in her quiet way, would stick her fist in the air and say ‘let’s organize, let’s get the work done’.”

Pogrebin and Steinem continued to be involved in each other’s and their families’ lives even after both had moved on from their roles with Ms.

They had lunch together in New York just this summer. Pogrebin remembers that one of Steinem’s greatest qualities was her positive outlook, but seasoned, not naive – she had grown up in poverty through a tough childhood. But she was upbeat despite some current setbacks to equality and women’s progress in, particularly, the form of Donald Trump, Pogrebin said.

“She refused to look at any of that stuff about ‘trad wives’ or the ‘manosphere’ or, you know, Trump renaming everything and erasing women … she would look instead always at what young women were doing and what a powerful force they were.”

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