The American hybrid journalist-activist Gloria Steinem is one of the twentieth century’s most influential feminists. She was famously a Playboy bunny, but one who wrote a magazine article entitled “A Bunny’s Tale”, revealing the exploitative working conditions bunnies endured. She shot to prominence as a feminist leader with her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”. In 1972, she co-founded Ms. Magazine and a few years later she wrote “If Men Could Menstruate” for Cosmopolitan magazine. Contrary to common belief, she did not coin the phrase “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, although it’s easy to see why people thought she did, such has been her feminist reach. Her activism has seen her protest the Vietnam War, the apartheid system in South Africa, the Gulf War and to recently campaign for disarmament in Korea. In her first ever visit to this country, the remarkable 81-year-old public intellectual looks back and references her just published memoir My Life on the Road.
She is in conversation with Edinburgh Book Festival Director Nick Barley.
Supported by Embassy of the United States of America