Guess Which Magazine Once Paid Gloria Steinem With a Gucci Bag?

Gloria Steinem at a movie premiere. (Photo: AP Images)

Time magazine was smart enough to ask Gloria Steinem to pen an essay on the women’s movement in the 1970s. But they were dumb enough to pay her with a Gucci bag.

In an interview with Fusion, the feminist icon recalls learning she’d been paid less than her male colleagues for the same project, a personal essay the magazine featured every month. “First of all, they asked me to do it because they didn’t have a woman on staff,” she says. “Secondly, I did it under deadline because it never occurred to me that they would pay me less than they did men writing the same essay. … When my agent got the check, he told me that I was getting paid less than men who wrote the same essay.”

Like any good feminist, Steinem went back to Time and demanded equal wages for her work. Like any good misogynst, the editor sent her a Gucci bag to make up for the difference. And while Gucci might be all the rage right now, not everyone needs it to breathe, Harry Styles-style. “I took the purse back to Gucci because I needed the money, and tried to get cash for it and I couldn’t,” Steinem says. The anecdote is no doubt one of the many reasons Steinem has spent the past half-century fighting for equal wages for women.

She has used much of the time on her press tour for her new memoir, My Life On The Road, talking about how equal rights and wages would improve the economy as a whole. She says she’s constantly talking to women about how much they make, whether at parties or conferences, and says communication is the only way to know how much you should be earning for your work.

Here’s a novel idea: Pay women the same as men, and then let them decide how they’d like to spend their hard-earned cash.

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