Gloria Steinem's Long and Revealing History With TIME

Over the course of her long and influential life, Gloria Steinem went from being described in the pages of TIME as “one of the best dates to take to a New York party these days” and “smashing looking Gucci liberal” to being lauded as a “feminist icon.” If nothing else, the shift in the tone of her coverage in the magazine provides a window into the change in attitudes toward women that she helped engineer over the course of her 92-year life, which ended on Sept. 2.Let’s add one more description to the list: durable dynamo. Steinem never outlived her ability to be relevant, inspiring several generations of women to organize and strive to be given the same opportunities as men. She never stopped blazing a trail for those who faced a particularly dense thicket and she never thought small. “I believe that things are a circle, not a hierarchy,” she said to TIME in 2011. “The kind of society we are striving toward is one in which things are linked not ranked. And one in which we understand that the women’s movement and the anti racist movement and the gay movement and the environmentalist movement, they’re all linked.”Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, to a homemaker mother and a father...