Kriti Mehrotra
Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to homemaker Ruth Nuneviller and traveling salesman Leo Steinem, Gloria Steinem has always conceded that her early years have shaped who she is. Her mother had had a “nervous breakdown” shortly before she was born, resulting in her developing some mental health issues, so she grew up sadly watching Ruth being mistreated. She did understand why her parents divorced when she was merely 10, yet the ensuing financial implications as well as the general apathy they experienced opened her mind to social injustices. The fact that she had grown up hearing tales about her suffragette paternal grandmother, who had even rescued many fam ily members from the Holocaust, also played a role in her eventual career.
How Did Gloria Steinem Earn Her Money?
It wasn’t long after Gloria Steinem graduated from Western High School and enrolled at Smith College for a Bachelor’s in Arts that she realized she wanted to pursue a social-political career. Therefore, upon receiving her degree magna cum laude, she spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow before returning to her homeland and quickly making a name for herself. She did so in the late 1950s by serving as the Director of the Independent Research Service (later revealed to be funded by the CIA, unbeknownst to her), through which she sent non-Communist local students to the World Youth Festival. From there, she went on to establish herself as a writer in the hopes of bringing about change and was almost immediately hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine in 1960.
Gloria subsequently managed to take on a freelance position, too, which enabled Esquire magazine to approach her and give her arguably her first “serious assignment” on contraception. Little did she know that this piece, along with her 1963 report in Show magazine about the treatment of Playboy Bunnies at their workplace, would propel her name in the industry under a complex light. She reportedly had trouble securing work for a while after the latter was published, since she had worked as a Bunny herself for research purposes, only for many to write her off for it all. Thankfully, less than a year later, Cosmopolitan gave Gloria a chance by letting her conduct an interview with the Beatles’ John Lennon, following which she got to work at NBC Television.
As per reports, Gloria became a writer for the satirical ‘That Was The Week That Was,’ through which she built such a profile and reputation that she landed a job at New York Magazine in 1968. She subsequently covered many topics related to real women’s issues, including illegal abortions, while admitting she’d had one herself in London at the age of 22 while on her way to India. This is when Gloria found herself in the company of many second-wave feminists, only to feel a click as she realized she is also a feminist and one with the power to call for change with her words. Residing in New York, that’s what she did to the best of her abilities for a while before recognizing the need for a true women-centric feminist magazine, resulting in her co-founding Ms. in 1972.
The success of her publication was undeniable from the first issue, driving her to become a public speaker as well as a nationally recognized leader of the second-wave of feminism. It’s imperative to note that Gloria also played a significant role in Ms. Magazine’s 1974 collaboration with public television to produce ‘Woman Alive!,’ with her even proudly featuring in the first episode. This magazine was donated to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001, yet by this point, it had already made a lot of difference, enabling the founder as well as other women to move forward. In 1972, the 38-year-old became the first woman to speak at the National Press Club, later taking on many more speaking engagements as well as op-eds for other established publications.
Gloria is behind powerful pieces such as “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” (1969) and “If Men Could Menstruate” (1978), amongst many more, all of which had a massive impact on the feminist movement. As if that’s not enough, she was one of the 300+ women who founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) in 1971 while also engaging in activism and political campaigns. That same year, she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, too, before becoming a proud associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP) six years later in 1977.
As the years passed by, Gloria continued to support the network of feminists as well as worked to advance their causes and legislation – she has always been wholly dedicated to the cause. This is how she co-founded Choice USA in 1992 for women’s reproductive rights and helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day to ensure young girls could see themselves in the workforce if they wanted. Furthermore, we should mention that this journalist is also a co-convener of the UN’s Sisterhood Is Global Institute project called the Frontline Women’s Fund and a chair of the advisory board of an Indian non-profit fighting sex trafficking and inter-generational prostitution called Apne Aap Women Worldwide.
Gloria Steinem’s Earnings and Net Worth
Considering the fact that Gloria Steinem has been an active journalist and social-political activist for over six decades as of writing, she has managed to accumulate significant wealth for herself. We don’t know her precise income range over the years since she has understandably kept such details of her career well away from the limelight, but we do have an estimation. After all, it is a culmination of all her written work, her public appearances, her activism, as well as Ms. magazine’s success – the latter truly was a gamechanger, as also explored in HBO’s ‘Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print.’
From what we can tell, the cost for Ms. Magazine’s subscription in its early years, in the 1970s, was $10, but it grew to $15, $20, and then eventually $40 per year by the early 1990s. On the flip side, without subscriptions, any issue of the publication at any newsstand across the nation was reportedly priced at $1.50 early on before climbing up to $4.50 by the 1990s. Therefore, assuming they initially sold 300,000 per issue, which later grew to over a million per month, with Glorida being a Founder and writer, she reportedly secured between $7,000 and $15,000 per year over the years.
Coming to Gloria’s other written work, she likely made $70 a week in the 1960s and 1970s, which grew little by little with each passing year until she really established herself. However, today, with her having 10 published books under her belt, including ‘Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions’ (1983), ‘Moving Beyond Words’ (1993), ‘Doing Sixty & Seventy’ (2006), and ‘My Life on the Road’ (2015), her overall income from her written work seeming easily crosses a couple of millions. Therefore, considering this 91-year-old trailblazing feminist, activist, and leader’s continued public presence across the world, along with her jet-setting lifestyle, work with non-profit organizations, and more, we believe her net worth to be $15 million.
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