My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem review – reflections of a tireless campaigner

The feminist’s illuminating autobiography reveals that, at 81, she’s found peace at last

The late feminist academic Carolyn Heilbrun spent five years writing a biography of Gloria Steinem. The Education of a Woman was published in 1995 when Steinem was 61. Heilbrun was mystified by Steinem’s “endless lending of herself to causes great and small”, always on the road, always living out of suitcases and unpacked boxes in the Manhattan brownstone she had bought in 1968. Steinem, Heilbrun decided, “to work effectively for the righting of many social wrongs, required a personality ill at ease with introspection …[she was] a subject who had little interest in delving”.

In her latest book, My Life on the Road, Steinem, a social activist, writer, lecturer, itinerant feminist organiser and transformational leader, offers snapshots of dozens of women she has met crisscrossing America, including portraits of her powerful partners on speaking tours such as African American Florynce Kennedy and Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected chief of the Cherokee nation. In the process, perhaps for the first time, Steinem most certainly does delve.

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