Gloria Steinem ’56 has been the face of the feminist movement for more than four decades. A bestselling author and co-founder of both New York magazine and Ms. magazine, she also helped launch some of the most important women’s groups of the past century, including the Ms. Foundation for Women, Women’s Action Alliance, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Choice USA, the Women’s Media Center, and GreenStone Media. In 1993, Steinem was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Her public persona—the stylish, confident firebrand whose face and name are known around the world—belies her chaotic childhood. Before she was an activist and thinker, she was a young girl from a troubled Toledo, Ohio, family. By the age of 12, she had never completed a full year of school, but she possessed a passion for literature that formed the basis of her education. She followed her older sister, Susanne Steinem Patch ’46, to Smith, where she majored in government, fell in love with the works of Plato and Dostoyevsky, served as historian for the class of 1956, and was briefly engaged to an Air Force pilot who once wrote “Gloria” in the sky over campus.

The aerial display was a fitting tribute to a woman whose name has loomed large for Smith women ever since. Today, at 75 years old, Steinem is still traveling, lecturing, and fighting for change, and she’s currently at work on Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered, a book about her experience as a feminist organizer. Over iced tea at her home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she paused to reflect on her past and talk about what comes next.

In your 2007 commencement address at Smith, you said, “Even now my generation, probably some of yours too, are living out the unlived lives of our own mothers.” How did this apply to your life?
My mother had been a newspaper reporter before I was born. She was a pioneer in her field and loved her work. Then she married my father, a very nice, kindhearted, fun-loving man. They never should have married. They really shared very few interests. And she had my sister, who is nine years older, so all the stresses and strains of that plus many, many other things all converged on her. She had what was then called a nervous breakdown, and she was in a sanatorium for quite a while. After that, in order to save herself, she left all of her friends and her work. I never knew that, until much later. I remember little things. I still know much of Edna St. Vincent Millay and other poets by heart because she taught them to me. She was an influence, but I never knew who she might have been until much later. So today, when I hear a young woman say to me, “I hope I can have as interesting a life as my mother,” it’s so moving, because they’re not saying the same life. It’s not imitative. It’s as interesting. That to me is a huge sign of progress.

How did your years at Smith influence the woman you’ve become?
I was looking to Smith to get me out of Toledo, so that I would not be working in the phone company, married to a man who worked in the factories, and I would not be bowling on Thursday nights and getting beaten up on Saturday nights. Because my living circumstances—taking care of my mother and so on—had not been good, to put it mildly, Smith was a place where I got three meals cooked for me each day and books to read. Smith was a lifeline. I thought it was heaven. I discovered I could understand things that were supposed to be for other people. I was taking a course in political philosophy; I could actually read and comprehend Plato. It was mind boggling to me. It opened doors, but it definitely did not open feminist doors at all, on the contrary. It was a very conventional time. And now I think how much more Sylvia Plath, say, must have suffered because of that. She was only two years ahead of me at Smith.

Do you remember when and why you decided to become a feminist?
I was 35. It was before Roe v. Wade. The New York state legislature held hearings on abortion and invited only fourteen men and one nun to testify. A group of early feminists organized an alternate hearing in a church basement and I went to cover it for New York magazine. I’m sure that what was calling me to cover it was also the fact that I had an abortion and told no one, absolutely no one. When I heard women standing up and telling the truth in public about an experience that was solely female, and either not taken seriously or taken very seriously, as a moral judgment, it was just a big “aha.” The stories were so moving and so true and authentic. That left me with this huge question: Why is it illegal? There are different statistics, but at least one out of four women, even then, have needed an abortion at some point in their lives. Why were we made to enter a criminal underground, and be sexually exploited, and have our lives endangered?

Do you think young women give enough credit to you and others who have opened so many doors?
Susan B. Anthony said, “Our job is not to make young women grateful, it’s to make them ungrateful.” I did not walk around saying, “Thank you so much for the vote.” I got mad because of what was happening to me. It is helpful to know your history, because otherwise you may believe, as I believed, for instance, that women were given the vote, which was ridiculous. I had no conception that we had fought for it, and brought the country to a halt for it, and gone on hunger strikes for it. It is important to know your history, but what activates us is what we experience. So I don’t mind at all. In lecture situations, sometimes people will say, “What’s your message to young women?” I always say, “Don’t listen to me. Listen to yourself. Listen to the wisdom that’s in there.”

1. She co-founded Ms. magazine.
2. She has a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
3. She has dedicated her life to righting wrongs.
4. She’s just plain cool.
5. She’s fearless.
6. She has the ear of world leaders.
7. She’s a vegetarian.
8. She isn’t afraid to get arrested while standing up for a cause she believes in.
9. She’s been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
10. She protested the war in Vietnam.
11. She has a Smith sister, Susanne Steinem Patch ’46.
12. She was once engaged to an Air Force pilot who wrote “Gloria” in the sky over the Smith campus.
13. She was Smith’s Commencement speaker not once, not twice, but three times (in 1971, 1995 and 2007).
14. She is the focus of a documentary, Gloria: In Her Own Words.
15. She wrote the bestseller Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.
16. She’s an advocate for animals.
17. She’s greeted like a rock star every time she comes to Smith.
18. She received the Women’s Sports Journalism Award.
19. She went undercover as a Playboy bunny and then wrote an exposé about it.
20. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women.
21. She was awarded the prestigious Ceres Medal from the United Nations.
22. She promotes the power of positive thinking.
23. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith.
24. She co-founded, with Jane Fonda, the Women’s Media Center.
25. She excels in rhetoric and debate, with ready facts to back up her assertions.
26. She once said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
27. She’s funny.
28. She spent the late ’60s championing labor causes.
29. She donated her papers to the Sophia Smith Collection. They occupy 106 feet of shelf space.
30. She spent two years studying and writing in India following her graduation in 1956.
31. She was a correspondent for the Today Show.
32. She wrote the bestseller Revolution From Within in 1992.
33. She elicits letters like this one from 1975: “Until August of 1970, I was a secretary, bored and feeling helpless. I was told college was only for boys. Well, the women’s movement changed that. As I heard you speak, I resolved to change the injustices of the past.”
34. She says, “A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
35. She co-produced the HBO documentary Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories, which won an Emmy.
36. She grounds her activism in the teachings of Gandhi.
37. She wrote a book about the life of Marilyn Monroe, titled Marilyn: Norma Jean.
38. She was on the front lines of the movement for marriage equality.
39. She’s a favorite guest on Real Time with Bill Maher.
40. She has been profiled on Showtime.
41. She produced a film about the death penalty for the Lifetime network.
42. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
43. She was the first to be awarded the Doctorate for Human Justice from Simmons College.
44. She has been published in The New York Times Magazine.