OPINION:
Gloria Steinem, who died on Sept. 2 at age 92, did not liberate women. The Industrial Revolution did that. Think of all those labor-saving devices. Still, she did a number on marriage and the family.
It always struck me as odd that a group calling itself feminist rejects the essence of femininity — the ability to give life and nurture.
As much as anyone of my era, “little Gloria” changed the world for the worse. Broken marriages, broken families and the loneliness of men and women unable to connect can all be laid on the altar of this feminist icon and her minions.
Steinem helped shape a worldview that held men are the oppressors, that a woman without a career is tragically unfulfilled, that a housewife is a domestic slave and that abortion is reproductive freedom and should be celebrated.
She helped popularize the feminist motto “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Yet fish and bicycles do not marry and have children or hold each other in bed at night. They do not care for each other at the end of life’s journey. They do not assure the survival of humanity by producing the next generation.
Steinem had an abortion in 1957, when it was still illegal, and spent the rest of her life trying to justify it. She once told an interviewer that “abortion gave me my life” and “I wouldn’t have been able to live my life otherwise.”
In other words, her journey to self-fulfillment started with the death of her child. Did the child get a say in this? Like other totalitarian “isms” — communism and fascism — the starting point of feminism is death.
She also helped advance Islamism, another death cult, by supporting “inclusive immigration laws.” She probably considered female genital mutilation, child brides and honor killings just quaint customs.
She never spoke out against societies where women are flogged for appearing in public bareheaded. Did she understand that a Methodist was probably less likely than an Islamist to fly a plane into a building?
When the twin towers came down, she was probably leading a march for equal pay.
The 1970s cute chick with aviator glasses always had to be in with the “in” crowd. Her ideas on transgenderism necessarily changed with the times.
In 1977, she questioned some aspects of surgical transitioning/mutilation. By 2013, she had apologized for her earlier “transphobic” remarks. “I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives,” Steinem wrote.
Sure they are — about as real and authentic as women who deny their nature and make abortion the starting point of their quest for authenticity.
Steinem ended up throwing women under the bus by supporting the entire transgender agenda, including biological men on women’s sports teams and in women’s spaces.
She and her sisters shaped the society we live in. They taught young women that men are the enemy, ogres who would use and abuse them if given half a chance.
It worked.
In a 2025 Survey Center poll, 66% of Democratic women ages 18 to 29 said the problems women face are largely because of men. Only 18% of Republican women in the same age group had a similarly warped perspective.
The triumph of feminism is reflected in the dramatic decline of marriage and childbearing. Since 1970, the marriage rate has dropped by nearly 60%. According to the Census Bureau, in 1949, married couples made up 79% of U.S. households. Today, that number is 46%.
Our fertility rate — the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime — is at an all-time low of 1.6, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Soon, our population will begin shrinking with no end in sight.
Humanity is going out of business. Feminists are hanging the “closed” sign on the door.
Has all this made liberated women happier? The National Institute of Mental Health reports that the percentage of adult women experiencing a “major depressive episode” is approximately twice that of adult males.
Gloria Steinem grew up in a world without men. She had a sister but no brothers. Her parents divorced when she was 10. Her mother, who suffered from acute mental illness, never remarried.
She was raised in a world without masculine role models. Perhaps that was why she thought of men as creatures from another galaxy and taught other women to see them the same way.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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