Biography | Gloria Steinem — The Village Church Basement Where the Speak-Out Changed Her Beat

On 21 March 1969, the radical feminist group Redstockings packed the basement of Washington Square Methodist Church at 135 West Fourth Street.

They called the night an abortion speak-out.

Twelve women testified about illegal abortions in front of several hundred people.

The group had disrupted a New York legislative hearing a month earlier because the scheduled experts were men and a nun.

Steinem came as a writer for New York magazine.

She was 34.

In 1957, after Smith and before India, she had obtained an abortion in London.

Sitting in the church, she later wrote, she recognized that an experience she had treated as private was common, and that the silence around it was political.

The article that followed, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," was one of the first mainstream magazine pieces to treat the new movement as news.

The church, built in 1859-60, was known in those years as the Peace Church for its opposition to the Vietnam War.

The congregation sold the building in 2004.

It still stands, converted to condominiums called Novare, inside the Greenwich Village Historic District.

You can see the Romanesque Revival front.

You cannot go down to the basement as a visitor to a meeting.

The pin is the facade.

The moment was underground.

Photo: Washington Square United Methodist Church, later converted to apartments, Jim.henderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Gloria Steinem, 12 January 1972, Warren K. Leffler, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.