Gloria Steinem's Unreleased Interview: Life Lessons for the Next Generation

The Burnouts with Phoebe & Sophia

In this episode, hosts Phoebe and Sophia sit down with legendary activist Gloria Steinem to discuss her life journey and the evolution of fe

Key takeaways

• Gloria Steinem famously left her engagement ring under a pillow to flee to India to avoid traditional marriage pressures.
• Ms. Magazine was founded by a group of women specifically to provide a platform not controlled by advertisers.

Main topics

• Early life and India travels
• Founding of Ms. Magazine

Notable quotes

Do what gives you so much joy that you forget what time it is while you're doing it.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful masterclass in resilience and purpose

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) We're honored to sit down with Gloria Steinem today, a personal hero of mine, but also a journalist, activist, and the editor-in-chief of Miss Magazine, who's helped generations of women have their own careers. Today, Speaker 3 (0:11) we want to talk to her about leadership, about building mission-driven Speaker 4 (0:14) teams, and about staying true to your values. Gloria Steinem, welcome to The Burnouts. Speaker 3 (0:20) Obviously, so me and Phoebe are in our early 20s, and we're just starting our careers, and we're... figuring things out and so we wanted to ask you what did that period look like for you and what were the biggest things you learned? Speaker 2 (0:32) The biggest difference for me and my generation and you and yours is that I was definitely supposed to get married and have children. That was the whole idea, especially after World War II when there was an effort to rebuild the population. The emphasis on career was really not present. Speaker 3 (0:54) And how did you uncover like your spark and sense of direction when other people were telling you that was the type of life that you should have? Speaker 2 (1:01) Well, I kept thinking, okay, I'm definitely going to do that. I'm definitely going to get married and have children. Which of course I didn't. But anyway, that's what I thought. Just not right now. So I was engaged to a very wonderful, kind of exciting man who lived here in New York and had a great life and so on. So I figured I had to go very far away if I wasn't going to be tempted into that. It was so much more interesting than my life. So I fled to India. I had a small scholarship. It was newly independent, so it was a very romantic, inspiring, Gandhi-esque kind of image. Speaker 3 (1:44) And did you leave the man? You left him and he said... I did. Speaker 2 (1:46) I did. How did Speaker 3 (1:48) he Speaker 2 (1:48) react? I left his mother's engagement ring, which he had given to me, under the pillow. And left a note. Oh, Speaker 3 (1:57) you left a note. Did Speaker 2 (1:59) he ever contact you or reach out? Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Right. No, no. We did see each other and continue to be friends. And after I came back to this country and was traveling around the country and speaking, we had a relationship he called same time next decade. Speaker 4 (2:18) Oh, I love that. So when you get to India, because obviously you grew up here, what was it like, the gender roles when you arrived there in kind of this post-Gandhi-esque era? Are there still super stringent gender roles like there were here in the U.S., Speaker 2 (2:30) or was it different? Well, there was everything. I mean, there were very traditional parts of the country and cultures and families, and also incredibly advanced Indira Gandhi, you know, parts. And I remember one of my first projects was to write. some kind of introduction to Gandhi for my college classmates because there wasn't enough understanding of how important he was at the time. And I went to see a woman, a wonderful, wise woman named Kamala Devi Jatopadhyay, and we're sitting on her porch. And I'm asking her these questions about Gandhi. And she said, well, my dear, we taught him everything he knew. Speaker 1 (3:16) And Speaker 2 (3:16) it was women who had organized the march to the sea to get salt without taxes and so on. It was women who had started the handicraft movement, which became the big export of India. Speaker 3 (3:30) And how did you take those learnings when you went back to the United States? What happened next? Speaker 2 (3:35) Because of the Civil Rights Movement, which meant also a women's movement, there was more activity here than there had been when I left in the 1950s, and more hope. Just the question was how to fit into it. I mean, ultimately, we, Florence Kennedy, me, and lots of, you know, a whole group of a dozen women started Ms. Magazine because there were no women's magazines. that were not controlled by the advertisers. I mean, you had to write about the advertisers' products. Check Speaker 4 (4:09) out this laundry detergent. Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:12) You know, you were supposed to not even show a woman driving a car because it devalued the car. Okay, I didn't make this up. Speaker 3 (4:22) Oh, my God, that's crazy. So how did you guys end up funding the magazine? Speaker 2 (4:26) Well, we didn't pay ourselves very good salaries. We raised some money. We became a foundation, ultimately, so that we could raise money in that way. So starting Ms. Magazine was very crucial, including to our own lives, because then we had an office that we controlled and could bring our kids to. And