Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio to Leo and Ruth Steinem. Leo was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland. Ancestry of Gloria Steinem Ruth was of part German descent. The Steinems lived and traveled about in the trailer from which Leo carried out his trade as a traveling antiques dealer.

When Steinem was only a few years old, her mother Ruth, then aged 34, had a "nervous breakdown" that left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent. She changed "from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving" woman into "someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate long enough to read a book." Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally disabled. Steinem was only ten years old when her parents finally split in 1944. Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.

While her parents divorced as a result of her mother's illness, it was not a result of chauvinism on the father's part, and Steinem claims to have "understood and never blamed him for the breakup." Nevertheless, the impact of these events had a formative effect on her personality: while her father, a travelling salesman, had never provided much financial stability to the family, his exit aggravated their situation. Steinem interpreted her mother's inability to hold on to a job as evidence of general hostility towards working women. She also interpreted the general apathy of doctors towards her mother as emerging from some similar anti-woman animus. Years later, Steinem described her mother's experiences as having been pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality. She early resolved to remedy the situation.

Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., from where she graduated. She then attended Smith College, an institution with which she continues to remain engaged. In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine.

Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment," regarding contraception; he didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article. Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year.

In 1963, working on an article for Huntington Hartford's Show magazine, Steinem was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. The article featured a photo of Steinem in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs. Steinem's experience as a Playboy Bunny was later made into the 1985 movie A Bunny's Tale. For a brief period after the article was published, Steinem was unable to land other assignments, but that situation did not last long; indeed, Steinem landed a job at Felker's newly founded New York magazine in 1968.In 1972, she co-founded the feminist-themed Ms. magazine. It began as a special edition of New York Magazine, and Felker funded the first issue. When the first regular issue hit the news stands in July 1972, its 300,000 "one-shot" test copies sold out nationwide in three days. She even labeled it Spring Issue 1972 for that sole reason. It generated an astonishing 26,000 subscription orders and over 20,000 reader letters within weeks. Steinem would continue to write for the magazine until it was sold in 1987. The magazine changed hands again in 2001, to the Feminist Majority Foundation; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and serves on the advisory board.

Steinem actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, in addition to other laws and social reforms that promoted equality between women and men, helping to strike down many long-standing sex discriminatory laws, such as those that gave men superior rights in marriage and denied women equal economic opportunities. She also founded and co-founded many groups, including the Women's Action Alliance, on which she served as chair of the board throughout the 1970s, the NWPC, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Choice USA, and Women's Media Center

After conducting a series of celebrity interviews, Steinem eventually got a political assignment covering George McGovern's presidential campaign. Steinem became politically active in the Feminist movement, as the media seemed to appoint Steinem as a leader of feminism. Steinem brought other notable feminists to the fore and toured the country with lawyer Florynce Rae "Flo" Kennedy. In 1970 Gloria Steinem established herself as a leader of the Women's Movement with her impassioned Senate testimony in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and her essay on a utopia of equality, "What It Would Be Like If Women Win", in Time magazine. While Steinem would clash with both the older generation of women's rights leaders, most prominently Betty Friedan, as well as the younger, more militant Women's Liberation activists, she would gain a large, diverse, and multi-partisan following and become, alongside Friedan, the Women's Rights Movement's most prominent and influential spokesperson and leader. In 1970 she led the New York City march of the nation-wide Women's Strike for Equality alongside Friedan and then-Congressional candidate Bella Abzug. As the postergirl of the Feminist Movement Steinem was a frequent guest on the news and news shows, television talk shows and specials, and on the covers of newspapers and other publications, including magazines Newsweek, Time, McCall's, People, New Woman, Ms., and Parade. On July 10, 1971, Steinem, along with other feminist leaders (including Betty Friedan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Myrlie Evers, and several U.S. Representatives, including Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug) founded the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC). An influential co-convener of the Caucus, she delivered her memorable "Address to the Women of America." The next year Steinem became the founding editor and publisher of Ms. magazine, which speedily became a success, bringing feminist issues to the forefront of society and the media, quickly becoming the movement's most influential publication. In 1972, she also played a prominent role at the Democratic National Convention where she supported Shirley Chisholm's candidacy. That year Steinem and the NWPC had successfully organized bipartisan efforts to increase the representation of women at both major party conventions. In the early 1970s Steinem became the first woman to address the National Press Club.

In May 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, raised the question of whether Steinem had continuing ties with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Though she admitted to having worked for a CIA-financed foundation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Steinem denied any continuing involvement. Steinem was also a member of Democratic Socialists of America.In 1984 Steinem was arrested along with Mrs. King, Amy Carter, over twenty members of Congress, and other civil rights activists for protesting the apartheid in South Africa.

Steinem co-founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974, and participated in the National Conference of Women in Houston, Texas in 1977. She became Ms. magazine's consulting editor when it was revived in 1991, and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

Steinem played a variety of roles within The Women's Action Alliance, an organization whose initial mission was "to stimulate and assist women at the local level to organize around specific action projects aimed at eliminating concrete manifestations of economic and social discrimination.". She chaired the board from 1971-1978.

In recent years, Steinem has been an outspoken supporter of animal rights, including writing letters to the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health urging the office director to end the "cruelty, fraud, and waste" of NIH-funded experiments on animals purportedly conducted in the name of advancing women’s health. She played a significant supporting role in the 2008 Presidential campaign as a supporter of the Democratic front-runner, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the primaries, and Senator Barack Obama, the eventual Democratic nominee, in the general election. Steinem spoke out against perceived misogyny in the media, something that women of all political affiliations largely agreed was a problem, but attracted controversy with her controversial New York Times article Women Are Never Front-Runners, in which she expressed her belief that sex was a bigger roadblock to Hillary than race was to Obama, and her Los Angeles Times editorial Wrong Woman, Wrong Message, in which she gave her less-than-positive views on the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin, and called for a more inclusive Republican Party.

Steinem was also active in working for civil rights for African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities, working alongside civil rights leaders like Coretta Scott King and César Chávez, and took a public stance in opposition to the Vietnam War and in favor of gay rights. In more recent years she has been involved in international women's issues such as the campaign against female genital mutilation in Eastern countries and human trafficking.

Contrary to popular belief, Steinem did not coin the feminist slogan "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." The phrase is actually attributable to Irina Dunn.

At the founding conference of the National Women's Political Caucus, on July 10, 1971, Steinem delivered her Address to the Women of America.

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Steinem had to deal with a number of personal setbacks, including the diagnosis of breast cancer in 1986 and trigeminal neuralgia in 1994.

In 1992, Steinem co-founded Choice USA, a non-profit organization that mobilizes and provides ongoing support to a younger generation that lobbies for reproductive choice.

At the outset of the Gulf War, Steinem, along with prominent feminists Robin Morgan and Kate Millett, publicly opposed an incursion into the Middle East and asserted that ostensible goal of "defending democracy" was a pretense.

During the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment scandal, Steinem voiced strong support for Anita Hill and suggested that one day Hill herself would sit on the Supreme Court.According to two Frontline features (aired in 1995) and Ms. magazine, Steinem became an advocate for children she believed had been sexually abused by caretakers in day care centers (such as the McMartin preschool case).In a 1998 press interview, Steinem weighed in on the Clinton impeachment hearings when asked whether President Bill Clinton should be impeached for lying under oath, she was quoted as saying, "Clinton should be censured for lying under oath about Lewinsky in the Paula Jones deposition, perhaps also for stupidity in answering at all." The same year, Steinem defended Clinton against allegations of sexual impropriety that had been made by White House volunteer Kathleen Willey.

On September 3, 2000, at age 66, Steinem married David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale. The wedding was performed at the home of her friend Wilma Mankiller, formerly the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Steinem and Bale were married for only three years before he died of brain lymphoma on December 30, 2003, at age 62.Steinem has repeatedly voiced her disapproval of the obscurantism and abstractions prevalent in feminist academic theorizing. She said, "Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted...But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness--and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability." Steinem later singled out deconstructionists like Judith Butler for criticism: "I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead'. Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful. It becomes aerialised."Steinem has expressed support for same-sex marriage.

Steinem has been an influential player in politics since the 1960s. Her involvement in presidential campaigns stretches back to her support of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential campaign.

1968 election

A proponent of civil rights and fierce critic of the Vietnam War, Steinem was initially drawn to Senator Eugene McCarthy because of his "admirable record" on those issues. But in meeting and hearing him speak, she found him "cautious, uninspired, and dry." Interviewing him for New York Magazine, she called his answers a "fiasco," noting that he gave "not one spontaneous reply." As the campaign progressed, Steinem became baffled at "personally vicious" attacks that McCarthy leveled against his primary opponent Robert Kennedy, even as "his real opponent, Hubert Humphrey, went free."

On a late-night radio show, Steinem garnered attention for declaring, "George McGovern is the real Eugene McCarthy." Steinem had met McGovern in 1963 on the way to an economic conference organized by John Kenneth Galbraith and had been impressed by his unpretentious manner and genuine consideration of her opinions. Five years later in 1968, Steinem was chosen to pitch the arguments to McGovern as to why he should enter the presidential race that year. He agreed, and Steinem "consecutively or simultaneously served as pamphlet writer, advance "man," fund raiser, lobbyist of delegates, errand runner, and press secretary."

McGovern lost the nomination in the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Steinem gave McGovern credit for standing on the platform with Humphrey in a show of unity after Humphrey had clinched the nomination, whereas McCarthy refused the same gesture. She later wrote of her astonishment at Humphrey's "refusal even to suggest to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley that he control the rampaging police and the bloodshed in the streets."

1972 election

By the 1972 election, the Women's Movement was rapidly expanding its political power. Steinem, along with National Organization for Women founder Betty Friedan, Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, and others, had founded the National Women's Political Caucus in July 1971. Steinem attempted to run as a national delegate in support of Chisholm's presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, Steinem was reluctant to re-join the McGovern campaign. Though she had brought in McGovern's single largest campaign contributor in 1968, she "still had been treated like a frivolous pariah by much of McGovern's campaign staff." In April 1972, Steinem remarked that he "still doesn't understand the Women's Movement."

McGovern ultimately excised the abortion issue from the party's platform. (Recent publications show McGovern was deeply conflicted on the issue.) Actress and activist Shirley MacLaine, though privately supporting abortion rights, urged the delegates to vote against the plank. Steinem later wrote this description of the events:

Germaine Greer flatly contradicted Steinem's account. Having recently gained public notoriety for her feminist manifesto The Female Eunuch and sparring with Norman Mailer, Greer was commissioned to cover the convention for Harper's Magazine. Greer criticized Steinem's "controlled jubilation" that 38% of the delegates were women, ignoring the fact that "many delegations had merely stacked themselves with token females... The McGovern machine had already pulled the rug out from under them."

Greer leveled her most searing critique on Steinem for her capitulation on abortion rights. Greer reported, "Jacqui Ceballos called from the crowd to demand abortion rights on the Democratic platform, but Bella [Abzug] and Gloria stared glassily out into the room," thus killing the abortion rights platform. Greer asks, "Why had Bella and Gloria not helped Jacqui to nail him on abortion? What reticence, what loserism had afflicted them?" Steinem later recalled that the 1972 Convention was the only time Greer and Steinem ever met.

The cover of Harper's that month read, "Womanlike, they did not want to get tough with their man, and so, womanlike, they got screwed."

2004 election

In the run-up to the 2004 election, Steinem voiced fierce criticism of the Bush administration, asserting, "There has never been an administration that has been more hostile to women’s equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right, and has acted on that hostility." She went on to claim, "If he is elected in 2004, abortion will be criminalized in this country." At a Planned Parenthood event in Boston, Steinem declared Bush "a danger to health and safety," citing his antagonism to the Clean Water Act, reproductive freedom, sex education, and AIDS relief.

2008 election

Steinem was an active political participant in the 2008 election. She praised both the Democratic front-runners, commenting,

"Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists, and critics of the war in Iraq.... Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president."

Nevertheless, Steinem later endorsed Senator Clinton, citing Clinton's broader experience, saying that the nation was in such bad shape it may require two terms of Hillary Rodham Clinton and two terms of Barack Obama to fix it.

She made headlines for a New York Times op-ed in which she called gender "probably the most restricting force in American life," rather than race. She elaborated, "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women." This was attacked, however, from critics saying that white women were given the vote unabridged in 1920, whereas many blacks, female or male, could not vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and some were lynched for trying, and that many white women advanced in the business and political worlds before black women and men.

Steinem again drew attention for, according to the New York Observer, seeming "to denigrate the importance of John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam." Steinem's broader argument "was that the media and the political world are too admiring of militarism in all its guises."

Steinem was a vocal critic of sexist media treatment of the Clinton campaign. Following McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, Steinem penned an op-ed in which she labeled Palin an "unqualified woman" who "opposes everything most other women want and need." Steinem described her nomination speech as "divisive and deceptive" and concluded that Palin resembled "Phyllis Schlafly, only younger."

Steinem's social and political views overlap into multiple schools of feminism. This problem is compounded by the evolution of her views over five decades of activism. Although most frequently considered a liberal feminist, Steinem has repeatedly characterized herself as a radical feminist. More importantly, she has repudiated categorization within feminism as "nonconstructive to specific problems. I've turned up in every category. So it makes it harder for me to take the divisions with great seriousness." Nevertheless, on concrete issues, Steinem has staked firm positions.

Abortion

Steinem is a staunch advocate of reproductive freedom, a term she herself coined and helped popularize. She credits the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services hearings she covered for New York Magazine as the event that turned her into an activist. At the time, abortions were widely illegal and risky. In 2005, Steinem appeared in the documentary film I Had an Abortion by Jennifer Baumgardner and Gillian Aldrich. In the film, Steinem described the abortion she had as a young woman in London, where she lived briefly before studying in India. In the documentary My Feminism, Steinem characterized her abortion as a "pivotal and constructive experience."

Pornography

Along with Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon, Steinem has been a vehement critic of pornography, which she distinguishes from erotica: "Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain." Steinem's argument hinges on the distinction between reciprocity versus domination. She writes, "Blatant or subtle, pornography involves no equal power or mutuality. In fact, much of the tension and drama comes from the clear idea that one person is dominating the other." On the issue of same-sex pornography, Steinem asserts, "Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master." Steinem also cites "snuff films" as a serious threat to women.

Female genital mutilation

Steinem wrote the definitive article on female genital cutting that brought the practice into the American public's consciousness. In it she reports on the "75 million women suffering with the results of genital mutilation." According to Steinem, "The real reasons for genital mutilation can only be understood in the context of the patriarchy: men must control women's bodies as the means of production, and thus repress the independent power of women's sexuality." Steinem's article contains the basic arguments that would be developed by philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Transsexualism

Steinem has questioned the practice of transsexualism. She expressed disapproval that the heavily publicized sex-role change of tennis player Renée Richards had been characterized as "a frightening instance of what feminism could lead to" or as "living proof that feminism isn't necessary." Steinem wrote, "At a minimum, it was a diversion from the widespread problems of sexual inequality." Apparently concerned for Richards' effect on the legitimacy of women's sports, Steinem asked, "Why should the hard-won seriousness of women's tennis be turned into a sensational circus by one transsexual?" She writes that, while she supports individuals right to identify as they choose, she claims that, in many cases, transsexuals "surgically [mutilate] their bodies" in order to conform to a gender role that is inexorably tied to physical body parts. She concludes that "feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for transexualism." The article concluded with what became one of Steinem's most famous quotes: "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" Although clearly meant in the context of transsexuality, the quote is frequently mistaken as a general statement about feminism.

Prominent feminists like Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Donna Haraway have subsequently rejected Steinem's argument, embracing ideas of "queerness" and "the abject other" as vital to the destabilization and subversion of normative constraints.

In August 2008, Steinem appeared on the radio program Weekday and stated that her Wikipedia page falsely attributed to her that she had "condemned transsexualism, which I absolutely had never done."

Gloria Steinem has been criticized for relying on sensationalism to further her political agenda. In one such case, Gloria Steinem claimed in her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem that "in this country alone, about 150,000 females die of anorexia each year." These statistics have been rebuked by the President of The American Anorexia and Bulimia Association - the organization which provided her quoted study - who said, "We were misquoted." The 150,000 figure was actually the estimated number of women and girls who suffered from eating disorders, not the number killed by them.

• The Education of A Woman: The Life and Times of Gloria Steinem by Carolyn Heilbrun 1995

• Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique by Sydney Ladenshon Stern 1997