Gloria Steinem died this Wednesday at the age of 92 in her home in New York. Journalist, writer, and one of the fundamental figures of American feminism, she dedicated more than half a century to turning women’s experiences into matters of public discussion. She also did so through her books, a body of work that combines journalism, essay, memoir, and personal reflection.
For Spanish-speaking readers, one of the best entry points is My Life on the Road, originally published in 2015 and edited in Spain by Alpha Decay in 2016. It is not a conventional autobiography. Steinem reconstructs her life from the travels she made over decades across the United States, political campaigns, feminist meetings, and, above all, the people she met along the way. The road functions there as a form of knowledge: traveling means leaving one’s own certainties and listening to other experiences.
The book also allows understanding one of Steinem’s central characteristics: her feminism was always linked to concrete experience. On her travels, she visited universities, unions, indigenous communities, and women’s organizations, among other spaces. Her activism was not built solely from large institutions but also from conversation and direct contact with very different people.
In Revolution from Within. A Book on Self-Esteem, originally published in 1992 and edited in Spanish by Anagrama in 1995, the author turns her gaze to a more intimate terrain. Steinem analyzes self-esteem and its relationship with social structures that determine how much value is given to some people over others. It is not simply about “feeling good about oneself,” but about questioning to what extent external inequalities end up affecting the perception each individual has of themselves.
A similar concern runs through Moving Beyond Words, published in Spanish by Paidós in 1996. The subtitle itself gathers several of the concepts Steinem wanted to discuss: gender, age, money, power, and body. Her proposal consists of questioning the categories that seem natural or inevitable and observing how they relate to each other in the construction of inequalities.
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Another of her significant books is Marilyn, dedicated to Marilyn Monroe. Steinem uses the life of Norma Jeane Baker to dismantle part of the myth built around the actress and observe the distance between a real woman and the image Hollywood turned into merchandise. The choice of Monroe allows her to return to one of her permanent concerns: the way society transforms women into images, roles, and objects of consumption, while leaving their real lives in the background. It is not available in Spanish.
Read together, these titles show that Steinem never understood feminism as a discussion limited to legal rights. Her writing also dealt with the representation of women, the body, self-esteem, work, sexuality, and the way power relations are reproduced in everyday life.
Her last book, An Unexpected Life, will be published posthumously and will extend the autobiographical vein of My Life on the Road. According to reports, it is a new volume of memoirs in which Steinem revisits her childhood, her trajectory, and the people who marked her life.
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