page_title: Gloria Steinem
section_title: 1972 election
hierarchical_section_title: Gloria Steinem / Involvement in political campaigns / 1972 election
caption_attribution_description: English: Gloria Steinem at a women's conference held at the LBJ Library on Nov. 9, 1975.
context_page_description: Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
  Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and a co-founder of Ms. magazine. In 1969, Steinem published an article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation", which brought her to national fame as a feminist leader.
  In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that "works to make women visible and powerful in the media".
  As of May 2018, Steinem traveled internationally as an organizer and lecturer, and was a media spokeswoman on issues of equality.
context_section_description: Steinem was reluctant to re-join the McGovern campaign, as although she had brought in McGovern's single largest campaign contributor in 1968, she "still had been treated like a frivolous pariah by much of McGovern's campaign staff." In April 1972, Steinem remarked that he "still doesn't understand the Women's Movement".
  McGovern ultimately excised the abortion issue from the party's platform, and recent publications show McGovern was deeply conflicted on the issue. Steinem later wrote this description of the events:
  The consensus of the meeting of women delegates held by the caucus had been to fight for the minority plank on reproductive freedom; indeed our vote had supported the plank nine to one.  So fight we did, with three women delegates speaking eloquently in its favor as a constitutional right. One male Right-to-Life zealot spoke against, and Shirley MacLaine also was an opposition speaker, on the grounds that this was a fundamental right but didn't belong in the platform. We made a good showing.  Clearly we would have won if McGovern's forces had left their delegates uninstructed and thus able to vote their consciences.
  However, Germaine Greer flatly contradicted Steinem's account, reporting, "Jacqui Ceballos called from the crowd to demand abortion rights on the Democratic platform, but Bella [Abzug] and Gloria stared glassily out into the room," thus killing the abortion rights platform," and asking "Why had Bella and Gloria not helped Jacqui to nail him on abortion? What reticence, what loserism had afflicted them?" Steinem later recalled that the 1972 Convention was the only time Greer and Steinem ever met.
  The cover of Harper's that month read, "Womanlike, they did not want to get tough with their man, and so, womanlike, they got screwed."
caption: Steinem at the LBJ Library in 1975
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2083", "Image ImageLength": "3000", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2019:11:06 23:08:28", "Image Artist": "LBJ Library photo by Frank Wolfe", "Image WhitePoint": "[313/1000, 329/1000]", "Image ExifOffset": "348", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "492", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "606", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4748", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2019:10:25 13:50:36", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2019:10:25 13:50:36", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2256", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3000"}