Gloria Steinem: The Face, Voice and Argument of Second-Wave Feminism

She never burned a bra. That much needs saying at the outset, because for half a century the myth clung to her name harder than most of her actual words ever did. The story goes back to a 1968 protest outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, where demonstrators tossed girdles, curlers and copies of Cosmopolitan into a “freedom trash can.” No fire was lit; a police permit had denied one. Gloria Steinem, who died Sept. 2, 2026, at her home in New York City, at 92, was not even there. Yet the image — flames, undergarments, feminist fury — fused into American folklore, and Steinem, as the movement’s most photographed face, absorbed the…