Biography | Gloria Steinem — The Bryant Park Rally That Closed the 1970 Equality Strike

On 26 August 1970, fifty years after the Nineteenth Amendment, the Women's Strike for Equality took Fifth Avenue.

The march formed at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in the early evening and walked south.

The city had granted one lane.

The crowd took the street.

It ended in Bryant Park, behind the main building of the New York Public Library.

Gloria Steinem sat on the coordinating committee.

She had already named the three demands as the heart of the day: equal work and schooling, legal abortion, and community child care.

Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Eleanor Holmes Norton spoke from the park.

Harvard's Catching the Wave photograph archive lists Steinem among the speakers assembled there that night.

Tens of thousands walked in New York.

Sister actions ran in other cities.

NOW's membership jumped in the weeks that followed.

Bryant Park is an ordinary lawn now, with chairs and a library terrace.

No plaque on the grass records the rally.

The geography is still readable.

Fifty-ninth Street is where the column stepped off.

This park is where it stopped talking to traffic and started talking to itself.

Photo: Bryant Park and the New York Public Library, Leifern, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Gloria Steinem, 12 January 1972, Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.