Gloria Steinem was insistent on not letting men define her.
The second-wave feminist activist and journalist, who died Wednesday, Sept. 3, at 92, was critical of marriage and spent much of her life unmarried and without children. The longtime choice, she said, was rooted in protecting herself.
"We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws. 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," the award-winning writer said when she finally did marry. "That's not true any more. It's possible to make an equal marriage."
Here's what to know about Steinem's marriage and family.
Was Gloria Steinem married? Her brief marriage to David Bale, father of Christian Bale
In 2000, Steinem married David Bale, the South African-born English
entrepreneur and animal welfare activist, in rural Oklahoma, a year after they first met. She became stepmother to David Bale's four adult children, including actor Christian Bale.
At the time, David Bale had been facing deportation after overstaying his visa, though the couple insisted his immigration status was not a factor in the marriage.
Steinem's marriage came as a shock at the time, after years of the feminist icon dismissing marriage as an institution that was not beneficial to women.
She once said women become a "semi-nonperson" in marriage, an institution that was "the model for slavery law in this country."
"Though I've worked many years to make marriage more equal, I never expected to take advantage of it myself," she wrote in a Voters for Choice release at the time, announcing the marriage. "I hope this proves what feminists have always said – that feminism is about the ability to choose what's right at each time of our lives."
During the ceremony, at the home of former Cherokee Nation chief and close friend Wilma Mankiller, the word "partners" was substituted for "husband and wife." Steinem did not change her last name.
The pair were married for three years before Bale died of brain lymphoma in December 2003. He was 62. The marriage was his third, and her first and last; she never remarried.
Did Gloria Steinem have children?
Steinem never had children of her own. In a 2020 interview on the "How To Fail" podcast with Elizabeth Day, she said she never regretted not having children, "not for a millisecond."
"People assume I must be unhappy or unfulfilled," she said. "Not everyone, but some people I think assume that … in a way that they wouldn't assume about a man."
And in a 2011 interview on "Chelsea Lately," she said, "Everybody does not have to live in the same way."
"As somebody said, 'Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.'"
Gloria Steinem's family
Steinem is preceded in death by her older sister, gem expert and former Federal Trade Commission staff lawyer Susanne Steinem Patch, who died in 2007 from a stroke. She was 82. Steinem was an aunt to Patch's six kids.
The pair were born to Leo Steinem, a traveling salesman, and Ruth Steinem. Gloria Steinem attributed her mother's nervous breakdown before she was born, and her treatment in mental institutions and the workforce thereafter, as key to her interest in social injustices.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Gloria Steinem's marriage was so shocking
