How Gloria Steinem’s lifechanging stay in India shaped her approach to feminism

From the publisher

When Gloria Steinem’s plane touched down in Bombay in 1957, she could not have known that her stay in India would become what she later called a “pivotal, life-dividing event [that] made me who I am”. She was 22, with a degree in government from Smith college and was travelling on a Chester Bowles fellowship. India was “not only a place I’d always wanted to go, but (also) an escape from a very kind and tempting man to whom I was engaged and knew I shouldn’t marry,” Steinem later wrote. The prospect of marrying Blair Chotzinoff, a pilot from a well-connected New York family, depressed her “enormously because marriage meant…

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