From Bunny to Brave Leader of Us All. Happy Birthday Gloria!
Gloria in her “underground” Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine.
I was 17 the first time I saw this, a Pittsburgh kid with grand ambitions for worldliness and intellectual heft and the ability to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink; so many that I actually subscribed to magazines like The Saturday Review, The New Yorker and SHOW: the Magazine of the Arts, where Gloria’s famous Playboy Club expose first appeared.
My reaction: “What a showboat, dumb thing to do!” My (never-less-than-honest) mother responded “You’re just jealous!” And she was right. Gloria had done something I so wanted to do – and so early in her career! How could I ever get from a Monongahela River mill town to that?
I never dreamed that Gloria, too, came from an industrial town – Toledo – much less that we would both have attended the same college, that I would hear her speak at my sister’s Smith graduation, and that, amazingly, I would actually come to know this remarkable woman. And here, on her 80th birthday, is what I learned:
In 1974, I told one of Ms’ spectacular co-founders how much I admired her. She replied “That’s how I feel about Gloria.” Heroes have heroes too, and hers was Gloria.
In 1982, for Ms. Magazine‘s 10th birthday, I produced an anniversary story called “A Day in the Life of Gloria Steinem” for the Today Show. The camera crew and I took a train from Penn Station to Philadelphia with her and followed her from event to event, including a couple of large public appearances. At least once every couple of minutes, a woman would walk up to her to thank her for something: courage, perspective, “you changed my life.”
Every time, every interruption, every stop on the street or in the hotel lobby or the ball room or the train, she treated each woman as if she were the first one she’d ever met. She listened intently. She responded in a very personal way. Every time.
To Gloria, every woman: each of us, all of us, has mattered to her. We are not just a formidable, critical cause, we are women who one by one by one have been living the lives women live, unequal, unheralded, amazing lives.
It is this that has made her the most remarkable of leaders, of change agents and of women. Never, in all the marches and speeches and honors and sadnesses has she forgotten that each one of us is all of us. She is not just a leader, she is a shining example. And inside each of us, we know it.
Happy Birthday Gloria – and thanks, from all of us here now and the girls and women yet to come.
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
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