Gloria Steinem

The granddaughter of the president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, Gloria Steinem traveled on a fellowship to India in 1956, an experience that inspired her first book, The Thousand Indias. Her exposé of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club, published in 1963, earned her notoriety and acclaim, and in the 1970s she emerged as a leader of the women’s liberation movement, helping to found the Coalition of Labor Union Women and Women Against Pornography. In 2013 Steinem was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.