Dambrauskas says he had known since the age of 12 he would not make it as a player, but coaching would keep him close to football.
He arrived in London in August 2002 aged 25 on a student visa with limited English.
What followed would be eight years of hard work where he would coach for community projects, at a semi-professional club, within professional youth programmes – and hold down multiple jobs while raising two children.
In 2004 he enrolled on a course in sports science and coaching at London Metropolitan University, the first real step in his career.
Then he started out coaching by volunteering with the Access to Sports Project for deprived children in Finsbury Park.
He went on to work with London Tigers, a charitable community organisation which runs teams from junior level right through to semi-professional.
Starting out as a volunteer, across five years he progressed to manage the first team in non-league football in the Spartan South Midlands League, FA Cup and FA Vase.
Dambrauskas became the first Lithuanian to achieve a Uefa coaching licence through the London Football Association.
“I went on every possible course, every possible conference, London Football Coaches Association meetings,” Dambrauskas said.
“Everywhere I could go just to gain some information, some knowledge, some extra diploma, extra course.
“That was very important for me and I took my chances.”
He got his first break at a professional club when Manchester United Soccer Schools took a chance on him in 2004.
Dambrauskas spent five years coaching on residential courses in the UK and in Europe.
“That was the best thing that could happen in my life,” Dambrauskas said.
“I went through three or four interviews. I will be forever grateful to [Foundation chief executive] John Shiels, the way he gave me this chance, because I didn’t have experience.
“I’d never been in a place with so many great personalities as I got in the Manchester United Soccer Schools.”
After a short spell with Fulham, Dambrauskas moved to Brentford. He credits academy director Ose Aibangee as one of the biggest influences on his career, pushing his limits.
All the while he was juggling home life and working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
“I was a gardener, a handyman, doing newspaper rounds at the beginning, also polishing floors in a pub,” Dambrauskas said.
“So many jobs. Working in retail, and then as a sports development officer, then a sports development manager, and the central YMCA.
“I was doing two, three, sometimes four jobs.”
As well as the trip to Manchester United this week, Sabah will complete their Champions League group games at Arsenal in January.
This also feels like fate for Dambrauskas – one of the buildings at London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road overlooked Emirates Stadium.
When asked about his time in England, Dambrauskas’ face lights up.
“When I hear this word ‘England’, it for me sounds like opportunities,” Dambrauskas said.
“It was really amazing. England gave me all this and I’ll forever be grateful.”
It was 1963 and up-and-coming freelance journalist Gloria Steinem had been a working writer in New York City for roughly three years when Show magazine sent her on an undercover assignment that she was uniquely qualified for: to infiltrate Manhattan’s “greatest new showbiz gimmick,” the Playboy Club. She already had the beauty and brains, all she’d need was an alias, a leotard and a notebook. The assignment would change the course of her career, but not in the way that she’d hoped.
“GIRLS:
Do Playboy Club Bunnies Really
Have Glamorous Jobs,
Meet Celebrities, And
Make Top Money?
Yes, it’s true! Attractive young girls can now earn $200-$300 a week at the fabulous New York Playboy Club, enjoy the glamorous and exciting aura of show business, and have the opportunity to travel to other Playboy Clubs throughout the world.”
Armed with the above ad and welcomed by a grinning private guard calling, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny!” Steinem set out to expose the working conditions and interior lives of the bunnies slinging booze to the playboys who patronized the club. She subjected herself to the wardrobe fittings, which included getting her bunny suit stuffed to boost her breast size; she was poked and prodded during an invasive physical exam; she strutted through the club near-naked with sore feet and a suit so tight, she had to wrap gauze around her midsection where her skin had been rubbed raw; and various other indignities she underwent for the sake of journalism.
Documenting a lunch shift at the club, Steinem wrote, “Somehow, the usual tail pullings and propositions and pinching and ogling seemed all the more depressing when, outside this windowless room of perpetual night, the sun was shining.”
Steinem’s article accomplished what it set out to do, and not only were the working conditions at the club exposed, but some were subsequently improved because of her work. In her essay collection “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” Steinem wrote that in response to the story, Hugh Hefner wrote her a letter saying that her “beef about the physical given [to] the girls before they start work at the club prompted my eliminating it.”
Also as a result of her piece, she was slapped with a $1-million libel suit, subpoenaed as a witness in a liquor laws case against the Playboy Club, and received “obscene and threatening” calls.
Most notable, of the short-term results of the story, was the immediate impact it had on her career. Sure, in a lot of ways it had put her on the map, but she struggled to land serious journalistic assignments because, as she put it, “I had now become a Bunny — and it didn’t matter why.”
Steinem, a feminist icon and one of the most widely recognized leaders of the second-wave women’s movement, died on Wednesday at 92. Since she shed the bunny suit after her 11-day stint on the job at the Playboy Club, she went on to cofound New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine, which changed the course of the abortion rights movement with its “We Have Had Abortions” petition in which high-profile women admitted to having illegal abortions, Steinem among them. She played a pivotal role in spearheading some of the most influential and successful women’s rights efforts. And in 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of work as a journalist and activist.
Still, with all the aforementioned accomplishments, and decades later, Steinem said that her naysayers used her bunny work in an attempt to discredit her. For decades she considered the story a “professional error of gigantic proportions.” But later, she changed her tune.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” she told Ronan Farrow in 2020, when she was 86 years old. “But it is true that as old as I am, when anybody wants to put me down, they say, ‘Well, she was once a bunny.’ ”
In Steinem’s “Famous Last Words” interview, released on Netflix following her death, she closed the segment by addressing the audience. “Please tell your own story,” she said. “This is the most important thing we can do for each other: is to know each other through stories.”
I was hesitant to tell this story, and stewed over the potential risks I would be taking by telling it, but then I thought of the risk Steinem took. She dealt with fallout and she grappled with the ways the article may have hurt her career more than helped. But of the ample wisdom she imparted, its the power of women’s stories to shift culture, change policy and empower other women that feels most resonant.
I didn’t discover Steinem’s “I Was a Playboy Bunny” exposé until I was in college. I was in my late twenties at the time because I’d taken a few detours after I left high school, most of them dead ends.
One such detour led me through the massive hedge-lined gates of the Playboy Mansion. I was 18, and the E! reality series “The Girls Next Door” sparked renewed interest in Playboy bunnies. I wish I could say that I’d arrived at the mansion on an undercover magazine assignment, but the reality was different. I’d been watching a rerun of the E! show from a bedbug-ridden townhome in downtown Los Angeles, and earlier that day I grappled with whether I should pay my parking debt or buy a burrito.
I watched as the girls bounced around the mansion, appearing carefree, bedbug-free and parking ticket-free. Their lives, produced and edited as they were, appeared to be stable and glamorous, and I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should do that.” If Hefner was good at anything, it was creating a facade.
Like Steinem found, applying to be a Playboy bunny was surprisingly simple. I emailed a photo of myself in a swimsuit and shortly afterward, an invitation to a casting call at the mansion arrived.
At the casting call, I was handed a satin robe and pointed toward a small tent where I could change and a large tent with the photo crew inside. Steinem had likened wearing the bunny suit to feeling like meat on a hook. I, too, couldn’t shake the thought of a meat factory and almost instantly, realized I wanted off the conveyor belt.
My trip to the mansion and endeavor to become a bunny was short-lived. I’d driven there feeling like a femme fatale, and left feeling naive and out of my depth. Worse, it was just another humiliating misadventure that I’d carry around for years with shame.
Steinem said that she was pigeonholed because of the story. She struggled afterward to be taken seriously and that may be true, but I’d argue an opposite point. Because Steinem was ultimately held in such high regard as a journalist and activist, and because she was an undercover bunny along the way, she helped the bunnies of the world to take themselves a little more seriously, to see that beyond the bunny suit, there is a world of possibilities waiting for them.
In the collection, originally published in 1983 and reprinted several times, Steinem wrote that after a town-hall meeting in New Bedford, Mass., a little girl of 6 or 7 gave her a crayon drawing of her in the bunny costume copied from a photo that had circulated online. “ ‘Even if a girl looks silly,’ she said, ‘boys should know that’s she’s smart.’ ”
“This story may outlast me,” she wrote. “but it’s not going to outlast or outsmart that little girl.”
In the book, Steinem wrote that one longer-term result of the article was “realizing that all women are Bunnies. After feminism arrived in my life, I stopped regretting that I had written the article.”
The line “All women are Bunnies” stands out. But what I imagine she meant is, bunnies are just women.
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani has not played since Wednesday, when he struck out four times and winced noticeably at the plate.
On Saturday, the Dodgers held him out of the lineup for the third consecutive game because of pain in his right biceps.
Manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani’s path back to the field is predicated on how he responds to hitting in the cage, which he planned to do before Saturday night’s game against the Washington Nationals at Dodger Stadium.
“My expectation is that he’s going to hit today in the cage,” Roberts told reporters. “Once he hits and how he comes out of it, that’ll be telling for tomorrow.”
The injured list becomes a consideration if Ohtani is not trending in a positive direction Sunday, Roberts said.
Ohtani falls under the 15-day category for the IL, which covers pitchers and two-way players, as opposed to the 10-day list for position players. The Dodgers can backdate the move up to three days, akin to time served. So a 15-day window would be reduced to 12 days.
Although Roberts said he has not spoken to Ohtani about how he feels physically, the manager said he can get a hint from the player’s demeanor.
“When he doesn’t feel well physically, he gets more short and he’s not the same personality,” Roberts said, adding that Ohtani has seemed looser and more easygoing the past couple of days.
Michael Lomonaco can account for every minute of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — including the small decision that saved his life.
Lomonaco, the executive chef who ran Windows on the World on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was on his way up to his office when he stopped at an optometrist shop on the ground level to have his eyeglass frames adjusted.
He was still inside when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the tower above him at 8:46 a.m.
“I felt the buidling shake,” he recalled in the new CNN Films documentary “Top of the World.” “And I thought that can’t be the subway. That’s impossible.”
Lomonaco was evacuated. From the street, he watched employees of his own restaurant wave a white tablecloth from a window more than 100 floors up. Seventy-nine Windows on the World employees and 91 guests died that morning in the gastronomic soul of the Twin Towers — the one part of the complex that belonged to New Yorkers who didn’t work there, and to visitors from everywhere else.
“Top of the World” premieres Monday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CNN and begins streaming the following day on the network’s subscription streaming platforms. The documentary short arrives on a double anniversary: 25 years since the attacks, and 50 years since Windows on the World opened on April 19, 1976.
It is the work of producer-director team Betsy West and Julie Cohen, who made “RBG,” the Oscar-nominated portrait of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The film is a production of CNN Films, TIME Studios and Tribeca Studios, in association with Montalto Pictures and Storyville Films, and was inspired by Tom Roston’s book “The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World.” Actor Denis Leary voices the restaurant’s creator, Joe Baum, drawn from decades of archival recordings.
West and Cohen were reluctant to take it on. Both were working in network television news in 2001.
“There’s like a part of you that doesn’t want to go back there,” Cohen said in a recent interview. “But when we read this book and met some of the amazing people who had worked at Windows over its 25-year history, we realized this was actually a really good way into remembering there was a lot of beautiful stuff in the Twin Towers and like we shouldn’t let that disappear just because it ended so painfully.”
What emerges is a history of how a restaurant transformed the reputation of the monolithic Twin Towers, which received little respect from architecture critics and bafflement from a public that wondered why it was built in the 1970s by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as the city was fighting off financial collapse.
“This film tells a story of a restaurant that was very special to New York a time when New York was getting kicked in the teeth,” the Brooklyn-born Lomonaco said in a recent interview.
The World Trade Center operators turned to restaurant impresario Joe Baum to create a dining experience that would draw people to the Manhattan neighborhood largely known for its blocks of stores that sold radios and electronic parts. Baum was known for such New York dining landmarks as the Four Seasons and Tavern on the Green, and his new creation became an immediate hit after it opened in 1976, becoming a magnet for tourists and celebrities alike who came for the eye-popping views through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
At the time of the 9/11 attack, the World was the highest-revenue-generating privately owned restaurant in the U.S.
West noted another draw to the story was the stories of the many immigrants who worked at Windows, which proudly called itself “the U.N. of restaurants.” The film’s focus on the contribution of the foreign-born population to the restaurant industry stands in stark contrast to the image of immigrants conveyed by the Trump White House to justify its deportation efforts.
“Immigrants continue to make a contribution to our country and to the economy,” West said. “This was an opportunity to tell that positive story as opposed to what’s going on in our country now.”
Cohen and West scoured the Windows on the World Facebook page to find surviving former employees to help tell the story. Nathalie Tolentino was a hostess whose family came to the U.S. to escape political upheaval in Peru. Sekou Siby was a line cook from the Ivory Coast, who swapped shifts with one of the workers who died during a morning breakfast held in the restaurant on 9/11. Both talk about how the restaurant changed their lives.
Lomonaco is a central character in the “Top of the World,” as his arrival as the executive chef of Windows in 1997 boosted the restaurant’s culinary reputation. A hot chef who oversaw a turnaround at the 21 Club, another legendary New York dining spot, Lomonaco turned Windows into a destination for American cuisine along with the breathtaking views.
Lomonaco arrived after the restaurant was closed for three years following the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 but left the towers intact.
Once Windows on the World was gone, Lomonaco was offered high-profile restaurant jobs in other parts of the country. But he had unfinished business in New York.
“I didn’t want to abandon my city,” he said.
In the first days after the attacks, Lomonaco said, he read nothing about Windows on the World; coverage centered on the massive loss of life among the first responders and at the financial firms inside the World Trade Center. But over time, he got attention and support for the families of the employees who lost their lives that day.
Lomonaco and the restaurant’s owners formed Windows of Hope, a charitable foundation that raised more than $22 million to pay for healthcare and tuition costs for the children of the victims. “We were giving checks to people to pay their rent before federal funds came through,” he said.
Lomonaco said he still meets patrons who give him a matchbook or coaster from their visit to Windows. “They feel like they have to give me or send me these little artifacts,” he said. “That’s what has touched me the most.”
The first edition of the remade “60 Minutes” under CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss debuts Sept. 13 with a reliable formula from the venerable newsmagazine’s playbook.
Correspondent Jon Wertheim will lead off the 59th season with an in-depth look at the Los Angeles Rams, the favorite of oddsmakers to win the Super Bowl this season. Wertheim sits down with Rams general manager Les Snead, head coach Sean McVay and veteran quarterback Matthew Stafford. The segment will also explore team owner Stan Kroenke’s investment in technology, including artificial intelligence, to help the team gain an edge on the field.
Jon Wertheim interviews Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay.
(CBS News)
“60 Minutes” has often turned to sports-related segments when a season premiere follows a late afternoon NFL game. Last year, Wertheim profiled Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White for the 58th season premiere. The program scored more than 10 million viewers and was the most-watched non-sports program of the week. In 2023, Wertheim interviewed University of Colorado head football coach Deion Sanders for the 56th season opener.
CBS News will be under pressure to have “60 Minutes” get off to a strong start in the ratings following the major upheaval at the program earlier this year.
After the completion of a successful season where ratings were up 9% over the previous year, Weiss fired “60 Minutes” correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega — both of whom complained that the executive pushed them to add right-wing talking points to their stories. Weiss also dismissed “60 Minutes” executive producer Tanya Simon and replaced her with screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Nick Bilton, who has no previous experience in TV news.
In response to the firings, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the program and claimed she was putting “her thumb on the scale” for more favorable coverage of President Trump’s administration. Pelley was shown the door with cause after confronting management at a June 1 meeting. CBS denied the claims.
The discord meant the program spent much of the summer hiring replacement correspondents, including Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times opinion writer with no experience as a TV journalist.
Weiss, founder of the heterodox digital news site the Free Press, was hired by Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison with a mandate to pull the news division to the political center. The stated goal has put every move by Weiss under heavy scrutiny, as many critics have suggested she is at the network to placate the Trump White House while Paramount pursues its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Other new “60 Minutes” contributors include author and journalist Sebastian Junger, former CNN and Vice News correspondent Gianna Toboni, and Trevor Phillips, a British journalist who joined CBS News earlier this year as a senior global affairs correspondent. They will join correspondents Wertheim, Norah O’Donnell, Bill Whitaker and Lesley Stahl.
The program will also feature stories with CBS News correspondents outside of the core group at “60 Minutes,” such as Seth Doane and Matt Gutman.
The other two segments on the “60 Minutes” premiere, — which could include a significant newsmaker interview, — will be announced sometime next week.
This year’s premiere should get a strong boost, as most of the country will get CBS coverage of a late afternoon match-up between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings, two contenders in the highly competitive NFC North. The network’s pregame show “The NFL Today” is traveling to Green Bay for the telecast.
Eating breakfast in a South Dakota coffee shop, Gloria Steinem was all too aware of the couple eyeballing her from the next booth. He was sporting chains. She wore leather pants and what Steinem later recalled as “an improbable hairdo.” The place was packed with tough-looking, mostly male bikers pumped about a huge rally they were attending. Steinem, returning from a Sioux powwow honoring ancient tribal women, knew she wasn’t in her element.
Finally, the leather-clad woman came over and spoke up. “I just want to tell you how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years — and my husband too,” she told an astonished Steinem.
There was a time, the woman said, when rolling down the road meant perching on her husband’s back seat. But now she had her own sweet ride: “I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate, and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”
The image of that breezy, boisterous grandma stayed with Steinem for years. “I’ve come to believe that inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir. “We have only to discover it — and ride.”
Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. Magazine and for six decades a charismatic leader who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her foundation’s social media pages. She was 92.
“Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the posts said.
An activist, journalist, and relentless traveler who said she went for 20 years without spending more than eight consecutive days in her New York apartment, Steinem described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.”
“I raise money. I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet,” she told The New Yorker in 2015.
Steinem, who struggled with stage fright most of her life, talked with women at gigantic conferences and in intimate kaffeeklatsches. At book signings and on barstools, she sought their stories, sometimes re-telling them in her essays and on her countless speaking tours. Her portfolio of issues was vast, from sexual violence, female genital mutilation and racism to the more mundane injustices that helped fuel a movement for sweeping social change.
At one campus visit, the discussion turned to men who expect women to pick up after them. A young Japanese woman, silent for most of the increasingly raucous session, stood up, turned around to address 500 other audience members and said: “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor, I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.”
She had never before said a word in public, she told the cheering crowd.
Steinem had a “gift for empathy,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote when the feminist icon turned 80 in 2014.
“Women who read about her or saw her on TV felt that if they ran into her on the street, they would really get along with her. And women who actually did run into her on the street felt the same way. More than a half-century into her life as an international celebrity, she remains stupendously approachable, patient with questions, interested in revelations.”
Gloria Steinem, left, and Pat Carbine, two of Ms. magazine’s founding editors, in 1980.
(Dave Pickoff / Associated Press )
Famously attractive, Steinem over the years gave hope to young women who wanted to “stand up for their rights without being called man-haters,” Collins wrote. “She was evidence that it was possible to be true to your sisters while also being really, really attractive to the opposite sex.”
At the same time, she alienated the religious right with her fervent pro-choice advocacy. When Lands’ End featured an interview with Steinem in its 2016 catalog, outraged readers threatened a boycott. Company officials then cut their ties with the woman they had headlined as a “legend.”
Steinem first drew public notice when she was in her 20s and struggling to establish herself as a freelance writer. Her breakthrough story was a funny, scathing account of her two weeks as a Playboy “bunny” — a scantily clad cocktail waitress at Hugh Hefner’s Manhattan nightclub.
In some ways, the story backfired. Steinem became known not as a crusader for women but as a former bunny. For several years, her magazine assignments continued to veer toward “women’s page” topics — in 1964, she wrote about textured stockings for the New York Times — and even after she delved into serious political issues for New York magazine, she wasn’t taken as seriously as she would have liked.
In 1968, a Washington Post columnist described her as “the mini-skirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.” Two years later, a headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Gloria: Beautiful Brain in Ditto Body.”
Meanwhile, the women’s liberation movement had propelled itself into the mainstream, ignited by writers like Betty Friedan. For Steinem, though, it became a passion only after she covered a meeting during which women opened up about their illegal abortions. The event was held to protest a legislative hearing on abortion where the only witnesses were 14 men and a nun.
“Suddenly I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem recalled in 1983. “I had had an abortion when I was newly out of college, and I told no one. If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should we be made to feel criminal and alone?”
Nearly 60 years after her unwanted pregnancy, Steinem dedicated her memoir to the British physician who arranged her abortion after she agreed to two conditions.
The first was that she never reveal his name. (She did, long after his death.)
The second: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”
Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem didn’t attend school regularly until seventh grade. Most winters, her father Leo, an ebullient, 300-pound dreamer who was often in debt, would drive the family down back roads in a trailer, stopping here and there to sell antiques he’d picked up along the way.
Ruth Steinem, Gloria’s mother, was a former journalist who was hospitalized for long periods with severe mental health problems. From the age of 11, after her parents divorced and her older sister Susanne left home, Gloria often cared for her mom.
In an essay, “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” Steinem recalled her mother cutting her arm when she smashed a window to escape the Nazi invaders that only she could see. “I remember a long Thanksgiving weekend holding on to her with one hand and holding my eighth-grade assignment of ‘Tale of Two Cities’ with the other,” Steinem wrote.
Despite her patchy schooling, Steinem received a scholarship to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa after majoring in government. After spending two years in India on a fellowship, she worked briefly for an international youth organization funded by the CIA.
Basing herself in New York in 1960, she quickly became known for her stylish prose, sharp wit, and striking appearance. Within a decade she was “Gloria-Steinem-the-antiwar-gorgeous- bachelor girl who was pictured with Henry Kissinger in Time and Life…,” according to a breathless 1970 account in the Los Angeles Times.
But she was also the Gloria Steinem who helped start New York magazine, who wrote insightfully about the intersection between racism and sexism, and who in 1971 became the first woman chosen to address an annual banquet of the Harvard Law Review.
She zeroed in on the school’s failings.
“There is a course on international whaling law but none on women’s rights internationally,” she told the black-tie gathering. “An eminent professor of administrative law said as late as last night that he didn’t know what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was. The same man replied to a request that at least one full-time female professor be hired by answering that women faculty brought problems because of ‘sexual vibrations’…”
The following year, Steinem, with several other feminist journalists, founded Ms. Its first, tentative edition, a 40-page insert into New York magazine, sold out in eight days.
The debut issue of Ms. included pieces on gender stereotypes, lesbian relationships, and job discrimination. It also featured an open letter from 53 prominent women — including tennis great Billie Jean King, singer Judy Collins and Steinem — who revealed that they had undergone abortions.
While the magazine’s monthly circulation eventually topped 500,000, it also fueled skeptics. “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say,” newscaster Harry Reasoner predicted on national TV.
Ms. also took flak from some of Steinem’s sister feminists, who contended that it cast women as victims. As new waves of feminists confronted different issues, some became exasperated by Steinem’s seemingly perennial role as the face of the women’s movement.
“Guys in the media chose Gloria as our leader,” said feminist writer Susan Brownmiller in 2016. “A lot of us, our hope is that eventually, history will straighten this all out and say, no, Gloria came in a little later, and her very loyal supporters have backtracked that history.”
Steinem remained a contributing editor to Ms. for 15 years.
Gloria Steinem at home in New York City, 2010.
(Annie Leibovitz / Penguin Random House)
Meanwhile, she was crisscrossing the country, campaigning for liberal Democratic candidates, fighting laws restricting abortion, and urging legislators to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment.
“Like Sky Masterson, the wandering gambler in Damon Runyon stories, I’ve been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible,” she wrote, “and he didn’t wash his hair with hotel soap, eat from vending machines, or sit up late organizing with the hotel maids.”
In 2013, President Barack Obama gave Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Her books include a 1983 essay collection, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”; a 1986 portrait of Marilyn Monroe; her 2015 memoir, “My Life on The Road”; and works on aging and self-esteem.
Over the years, Steinem had longstanding romantic relationships with a number of men but vowed never to marry or have children.
However, at 66, she broke her vow and married David Bale, a British businessman and animal rights advocate. By then, the institution of marriage had changed for the better, she later explained.
“We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws,” she said. “If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights.”
Three years after their marriage, Bale died of brain cancer. Steinem’s stepchildren include the actor Christian Bale.
At 80, Steinem celebrated her birthday by riding an elephant in Botswana.
In the following years, she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, spoke at the Women’s March on Washington, helped save her hometown’s last abortion clinic and gave numerous interviews denouncing President Trump’s views on women. She was the subject of an off-Broadway play and was honored by Rutgers University with the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies.
For fun, she danced. When asked by TV hosts, she occasionally demonstrated a well-worn soft shoe routine, though her heart was with the tango.
“It’s a sick, authoritarian dance,” she told a reporter, “but I loved it.”
