Biography | Gloria Steinem — The East Toledo High School That Anchored a Childhood on the Road

Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on 25 March 1934.

The birth hospital is not a matter of public record, so this pin is not a delivery room.

It is Morrison R. Waite High School at 301 Morrison Drive, the East Toledo public school she actually attended.

Her father, Leo Steinem, sold antiques from a house trailer and ran a summer resort at Clark Lake, Michigan.

Her mother, Ruth Nuneviller Steinem, had been a journalist at The Blade and the first woman editor of the University of Toledo student paper.

The family spent winters on the road.

Gloria did not sit a full school year until she was about twelve.

After her parents divorced in 1944, she stayed in East Toledo with her mother, who lived with long-term mental illness.

The house on Woodville Road was the maternal grandparents' place, and it was not a public building.

Books were the other room.

Steinem later told The Blade that a small East Toledo library was where she worked the shelves in a zigzag, not left to right.

She entered Waite in 1948.

The 1914 Collegiate Gothic pile still stands and still takes students.

A 1951 yearbook photograph of her, public domain as a school publication of that era, is the face that belongs to this block.

In the summer of 1951 she left for Washington to live with her older sister, Susanne, and finished at Western High School in 1952.

Waite is the Toledo address a stranger can stand at without knocking on a private door.

The paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, had already made the city a suffrage town: she chaired education work for the National Woman Suffrage Association and, in 1904, became the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education.

That lineage is why this schoolyard is not a random hometown pin.

It is where the traveling childhood stopped long enough to become a record.

Photo: Morrison R. Waite High School yearbook, 1951, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Building photograph: Tysondetroit, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.