Gloria Steinem and India

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A year in India

Meghna.Dhulia, Sep 4, 2026: The Times of India

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Gloria Steinem was 22. Having graduated fr­om Smith College, she received a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship that gave her the chance to spend a year in India. Long after, the journalist, activist and feminist said it was in India that she began to understand feminism without yet knowing the word for it.

Steinem, who became one of the most recognisable faces of the American women’s movement for more than five decades.   Steinem lived for about a year in Miranda House hostel in Delhi, according to the college principal. She then travelled to Calcutta, southern India and Bombay, wrote about the country, and learnt grassroots organising from the followers of Mahatma Gandhi.

The trip to India, she is said to have recounted later, appealed to her not merely as a chance to step away from the life she knew, but as a way of discovering for herself a country whose history and culture had long interested her. Steinem even featured in sari ads, as a way of supplementing her income in India .