An Unexpected Life

Gloria Steinem, the feminist writer, activist, and organizer, reflects on more than nine decades of life in this memoir. Structured as self-contained essays arranged in a spiral from personal experience to culture and history, the book reframes hardship as education, profiles people who changed Steinem's thinking, and argues that pre-colonial Indigenous cultures offer models for a more democratic future.

In a preface, Steinem introduces herself as older than she ever imagined and happier than she expected, sustained by friends who serve as chosen family. She describes her home, a brownstone apartment on Manhattan where she has lived for more than 50 years, and traces a life of unexpected shape: She never married, had children, or held a conventional job, instead making a living as a freelance writer, speaker, and editor, first at New York magazine and then at Ms. magazine. Her mother, Ruth, was a former newspaper reporter for the Toledo Blade who gave up journalism after marriage. Her father was a gregarious dreamer who ran a summer dance pavilion and spent winters buying and selling antiques. Both of Steinem's grandmothers were Theosophists, adherents of a worldwide spiritual movement teaching the universality of human worth, and the family's openness shaped Steinem's worldview.

Chapter 1, "Bad Things I'm Glad Happened to Me," recounts formative hardships Steinem reframes as sources of learning. After her parents' divorce, she lived alone with her mother from about the age of ten, first in a basement apartment and then in a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo. Ruth had an addiction to sodium pentothal, a tranquilizer, and Steinem became her caretaker, staying home from school when her mother could not function. Despite these circumstances, Steinem worked after-school jobs and gained the knowledge that she could support herself. One night, a rat bit her hand while she slept, and her mother roused herself long enough to find a hospital, an experience Steinem uses to illustrate the dangers that especially beset the poor.

Her older sister, Susanne, a gemologist, eventually rescued them, finding a residential hospital for Ruth and giving Steinem a room in Washington, DC, to finish high school. Visiting her recovering mother, Steinem met Ruth as if for the first time: a woman who loved books, recited poetry, and had once planned to become a journalist before surrendering that dream to follow her husband.

Steinem enrolled at Smith College in the early 1950s and found, for the first time, a real home. She got engaged during her senior year but used a fellowship created by Chester Bowles, then the U.S. ambassador to India, to escape. She spent two years in India beginning in 1956, traveling with Gandhian organizers, activists inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance, as they moved from village to village. She witnessed principles of grassroots organizing: listening to people, knowing how they live, and going where they are. The experience also led her to rethink her earlier romance with Marxism after encountering radical humanists who taught that the means dictate the ends.

The chapter also addresses the intersection of race and feminism. Steinem recounts the 1970 Women's March in New York City, where 50,000 people gathered, and describes how Time and Newsweek put white women on their covers, portraying the movement as white despite its diversity. In response, Steinem began speaking as a team with Black feminist colleagues, including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a founder of Manhattan's first community childcare center; Florynce Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer; and Margaret Sloan, a community activist from Chicago. Together, they explained that racism and sexism are structurally intertwined. Steinem cites a 1972 Harris poll showing that 67 percent of Black women approved of the women's liberation movement, compared to only 35 percent of white women, and argues that Black women have been universal leaders but are rarely recognized as such.

Chapter 2, "People I Will Never Forget," profiles individuals who shaped Steinem's life. She opens with Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected as Principal Chief, the top elected leader of the Cherokee Nation. Steinem met Mankiller through the Ms. Foundation for Women board, and Mankiller taught her that laughter is the only emotional expression that cannot be compelled and is therefore a proof of freedom. As a young journalist assigned mostly to food and fashion, Steinem used interviews to meet people she admired. A 1963 visit to Vidal Sassoon's London salon led her to discover the Beatles. She profiles the writer James Baldwin at length, describing a 1964 interview in which Baldwin spoke about his Harlem childhood, his years in Paris, and his return to the civil rights movement. She also recounts going undercover as a Playboy Bunny at Hugh Hefner's Manhattan club for Show magazine, discovering illegal employment practices and a racial hierarchy among staff.

Other profiles include the photographer Annie Leibovitz; the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who was sterilized without her consent by a white doctor in Mississippi; Bella Abzug, the congresswoman who helped organize the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston; and the writer bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, with whom Steinem sometimes lectured to convey the movement's diversity. Steinem recounts traveling with Brenda Feigen of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Women's Rights Project to interview women who had been forcibly sterilized, and the resulting legal case forced states to implement informed consent guidelines.

Chapter 3, "Vertical History," develops Steinem's concept of history as layered in place rather than drawn as a horizontal timeline. Revisiting East Toledo after years of avoidance, she stood where she and her mother once lived and imagined the people who occupied the same ground centuries before Europeans arrived. She describes pre-colonial Indigenous cultures on the continent many Native peoples call Turtle Island, outlining matrilineal societies where women controlled their own fertility, communal decisions were made in talking circles, and many original languages had no gendered pronouns and no word for race. She argues that the Iroquois Confederacy, a longstanding alliance of Native American nations, was a major source for the U.S. Constitution, noting that Benjamin Franklin himself acknowledged this influence. She addresses the genocide of Native Americans, noting that 90 percent of Native individuals were killed by warfare and disease, and that teaching Native religion and language was illegal well into the 1960s.

Chapter 4, "Making the Invisible Visible," examines the historical erasure of women and marginalized groups. Steinem notes that her entire assigned reading as a government major at Smith contained just one sentence about women. She traces gender roles as the root of broader hierarchies, citing the study Sex and World Peace, which found that violence against females is the most reliable predictor of whether a nation will be violent internally or use military force. She connects patriarchy's origins to the discovery of paternity, which led to restricting women's freedom, and traces the European witch hunts of the 16th through 18th centuries, in which approximately 100,000 women healers were killed. She argues that childhood experiences of violence or neglect persist into adulthood and public life, contrasting Ronald Reagan, who denied his painful upbringing, with Bill Clinton, who identified with his mother's struggles and brought empathy into governance.

Chapter 5, "Hope Is a Form of Planning," recounts Steinem's evolution from freelance writer to itinerant organizer. In 1968, she joined other writers in starting New York magazine. In 1972, Steinem and others launched Ms., the first national magazine owned and controlled by women, after editor Clay Felker created a sample issue within New York. The premiere issue sold out in eight days. She catalogs comparisons of progress and stagnation: women gaining political power on their own rather than through marriage; the emergence of language, laws, and shelters addressing domestic violence; and the wage gap narrowing from 59 cents to 82 cents on the dollar. She notes that urgent problems persist: The United States lacks universal healthcare and childcare, maternal mortality ranks among the worst of industrialized nations with Black mothers dying at more than double the rate of white mothers, and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision has further restricted abortion access.

The final chapter, "Always Ask the Turtle," opens with a formative anecdote: During a college geology field trip, Steinem dragged a snapping turtle away from a road and into a river, only to learn from her professor that the turtle had spent a month climbing up to lay its eggs. The lesson she draws is to listen and understand before acting. Now in her nineties, Steinem describes her Manhattan brownstone as a gathering place for talking circles, small group conversations modeled on consciousness-raising groups where participants sit together, speak in turn, and discover shared truths. She reflects on aging, acknowledging that she regrets spending too much time doing what was expected rather than what she loved, but expressing gratitude for the accidents that shaped her unexpected life. She closes by affirming that we are travelers on a mysterious path who need one another.