This interview originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of Esquire. On Thursday, 2 September, 2026, it was announced that the legendary journalist and social activist Gloria Steinem had died at the age of 92. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
Early afternoon, Steinem's apartment in Manhattan. After some small talk about ageing, India, and the media's appetite for bullshit…
SCOTT RAAB: In the piece you wrote for Esquire ["The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed"] in 1962, there's the idea that the problem isn't so much the sexual liberation of women as a result of contraceptive technology but that there are so few liberated men. And you weren't wrong.
GLORIA STEINEM: I wouldn't put it that way anymore, because I think we're all enmeshed in this political system that is devoted to controlling reproduction. You didn't invent it; I didn't invent it. Thirty per cent of us are trying to preserve it, and 70 per cent are trying to change it. We're not active enough or voting enough or mad enough.
SR: I think it all comes down to the fear of the other. Racism. Sexism.
GS: I don't believe it!
SR: I'm so glad.
GS: The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together.
SR: Your hopefulness is heartening.
GS: I'm a hopeaholic.
SR: Hope isn't really one of the words I know.
GS: If you don't have hope, you're not gonna try.
A lot of the hope and the anger we can use for activism. We make it harder to combine those two things than any other democracy on earth. We don't have parental leave. We behave as if people are not parents!
SR: For many people in this country, there aren't any options. Without parental leave, without some government-subsidised childcare, there is no choice.
GS: There really isn't for us, either.
SR: This is the part of the Darwinist nature of capitalism that continues to drive me wild.
GS: I'm not gonna give capitalism Darwin. You can give capitalism Darwin.
SR: Are you hopeful about Hillary?
GS: She has a lot of guts.
SR: It's gonna get ugly.
GS: I think we should make buttons that say "Snow White and the 19 Dwarves." How many Republicans are there?
SR: It's an insult to little people.
GS: It's a good point. Trump is awful, really awful. As they say, he was born on third base and thinks he hit a home run. I mean, his father was enormously wealthy, right? If you or I had made him up, they would just tie us from the tallest tree.
I met Ivana, his ex-wife, twice—once at a ski resort. She was complaining because she had spent years, apparently, not skiing, until he learned to ski, because she knew that if she could ski very well and he couldn't, it would be death, right? So she waited years, and she finally thought it was okay for her to ski, which she loves, and he was still mad that she skied too well. So I think there's a person there! And I was going to write her and say, "If you would like to stand up for all of us, I'll stand beside you."
SR: Did you write her?
GS: After she reneged on her rape accusation, I thought maybe it was hopeless. I think maybe a large group of men should get together and sue Trump for libelling the species...
You wanna take your jacket off? Is it warm in here?
SR: I get nervous for these things, and especially if I'm meeting someone who's iconic.
GS: I'm not iconic. It's just me.
SR: There is an incredible amount of material on you. And then I get a Google News Alert, and I see Amy Schumer is saying, "I got an e-mail from Gloria Steinem—I can't believe I'm now in a position to..."
GS: That makes no sense! Look at everything she's done!
SR: I think it would be intolerable to feel like an icon. There's almost something not human about it.
GS: Well, my hope is that if we sat down like you and I, Amy and I would be okay. Icon just calls out for iconoclast. It's one of the dangers of the media, because I also feel that the people I see in the media are sometimes more real than I am, which is utter bullshit.
If you love your work, I'm not sure you have hobbies.
SR: I was at the Esquire offices today, and one of the younger editors, a woman, was talking about the third wave of feminism. Is there an identifiable movement at this point?
GS: Oh, yeah!
SR: I'm really not aware.
GS: It's just bigger and more diverse. We used to be more like 12 crazy people, so it was easier to identify us.
SR: Don't people need a particular figure of inspiration?
GS: A movement happens when people are inspired by somebody, but they do it themselves. You don't wait for someone else. You do it yourself. I think we just need each other's company and support. I don't think we need one person. We need a cell. There's always a certain number of people who are thinking the same thing you are, so it kind of coalesces. And they can't fire me! So this is a good thing. Movements need a certain number of people who can't be fired.
SR: Have you ever had a boss?
GS: No. Even working two days a week to do a regional edition of Ladies' Home Journal—they asked me to be in the office two days a week and I quit. I couldn't. I'm not proud of that, mind you. It was unreasonable. But I couldn't do it.
SR: What's a typical workday for you?
GS: I'm busy fundraising for two new things, one of which is the Rutgers chair [being established in her name]; the other is the Gloria & Wilma School for Organisers at Smith. We've had one meeting, and we've raised a fair amount of money, but it's just beginning.
SR: Is it hard to raise funds?
GS: It's always hard. But it keeps you more honest than Bill Gates.
SR: You're referring to his foundation? They seem to be doing great work.
GS: Well, you can figure out curing malaria and doing vaccinations from above, but I don't think you can do much else from above, and he and his foundation try to.
SR: Do you mean it's not enough to write a check?
GS: He thinks he has the solution, and he imposes the solution. I don't know this man, but I'm just looking at the effect of his foundation. For instance, in Africa, to deal with malaria, one of the projects subsidised millions of mosquito nets. First of all, people get malaria during the daytime as well as at night. And for various reasons, they just became a joke. There were just all these mosquito nets, so people started using them to fish. And they're too fine, and they brought in too much fish. They were a disaster. In India, there was a worse disaster, because the Gates Foundation decided that to deal with AIDS—which in their estimation was going to be a problem in India as in Africa, which actually it didn't become, but nonetheless, you can forgive that because it's a good motive—condoms were the answer, so they spent USD300 million on programs financing condoms for brothels and, you know, Sonagachi, which is the biggest brothel in the world, in Calcutta. There's no evidence that women have the power to make men use condoms.
SR: I'd say quite the contrary.
GS: And the guys who are the brothel owners and the traffickers were, at a minimum, saving money by not having to buy condoms. I know a lot of people who've gone to work for the foundation and left in despair. Somebody needs to write a really good journalistic book about what's good and not good about the Gates Foundation.
SR: I hope you don't mind me reading something to you that you wrote in your new book.
GS: As long as it doesn't make me feel like I should get my pencil out and rewrite it.
SR: This is about your father: "He listened to all my complaints about not going to school, like other kids, yet years after his death, I realised that I'd also been spared the Dick and Jane limitations that school then put on girls. Nor was he around when I finally understood that having a loving and nurturing father had made a lifetime of difference. Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men, did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could have made those qualities feel inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, kind men felt like home."
It's wonderful to have felt loved that way.
GS: I'm enormously grateful for that, because I see so many terrific women who didn't have that good luck and are struggling to get out of it. If you haven't been abused, you keep your instincts. I remember sitting on a couch with a guy. We were waiting for somebody else to come into this office, and he took hold of my hands at the wrist, so I couldn't move my hands, and reached over to kiss me. And I bit him on the cheek! I did not think about it. It's just an instinct. Like a cat.
SR: Feral!
GS: Blood was pouring.
SR: This was a colleague?
GS: He was a writer, but not a colleague. We all have good instincts unless they're beaten out of us or shamed out of us in childhood. I didn't know I was gonna do that! I had no intention of doing that. It's just self-defence. I wouldn't have done that if I had grown up in a different family. I would have learned that it was hopeless to fight back. I really feel lucky. I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don't know what might be possible.
SR: Do you feel a perceptible waning of energy or slowing down?
GS: No, energy is still there. I'm travelling and everything. Memory, though, for proper nouns is kind of scary. Google should appeal to old people everywhere.
SR: Do you have hobbies?
GS: If you love your work, I'm not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do. I'm not good at it.
SR: It seems like you don't say no a lot. You still speak and travel frequently.
GS: I try to ask myself the question, Could somebody else do it?, and ask them instead, you know, but I get seduced by what might be had.
SR: You went to North Korea in May. How was it?
GS: It's such an authoritarian country. It reminded me of domestic violence. It's like a family with a dictatorial, sadistic head of household who controls everything.
Our point was really to publicise the DMZ, because generations have grown up thinking it's permanent. It's the last remnant of World War II. The last division. And we made that division. Everyone wants reunification, it's just that the cultures are now so hugely different, and of course North Korea has nuclear weapons. We went to Washington and did a briefing for members of Congress. We got a lot of criticism, too, because we were viewed as excusing North Korea by having contact with North Korea.
SR: This is a peculiarly American construct.
GS: Some of it is like Joe McCarthy. We did get a lot of criticism, even though we went to endless lengths not to see any officials, much less play basketball with Kim Jong-un. Remember Dennis Rodman?
SR: There is the case of someone being used.
GS: I'm willing to give him credit. Maybe he thought that contact would be positive.
