PETA Spotlight: Gloria Steinem and Other Female Icons You Never Knew Were Veg!

For Immediate Release:
March 2, 2021

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

In honor of Women’s History Month (March), PETA (an organization founded by a woman and led by women) has chosen Gloria Steinem as one of five female trailblazers to celebrate—and the millions who look to these women as role models may be surprised to learn that their work for social justice includes animal protection.

Dubbed “the world’s most famous feminist” by National Geographic, Steinem has used her platform to advocate for animals in numerous ways, including by joining PETA in opposing the National Institutes of Health’s cruel and wasteful animal experiments and feeding two birds with one scone by helping to create a cruelty-free lip balm benefiting incarcerated women. As she has said, “The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving”—and she’s put those words into action by keeping animals off the table.

“Gloria Steinem understands that everyone—whatever skin they’re in and whether they have fur, fins, or feathers—deserves to live free from exploitation, suffering, and discrimination,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA encourages everyone to honor her legacy by showing solidarity across species lines and condemning the subjugation of any living being.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that sexual exploitation is rampant in the meat, egg, and dairy industries because of speciesism, the human-supremacist mentality that all other animal species are inferior to our own. Female cows are artificially inseminated (raped by inserting an arm into the rectum and a metal rod into the vagina), hens are shipped to slaughter once their bodies wear out, and mother pigs spend their entire adult lives confined to cramped metal crates.

Steinem has been named one of the 25 most influential women in America, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. PETA’s other honorees are Hollywood trailblazer Cicely Tyson, labor activist Dolores Huerta, educator and prison reform advocate Angela Davis, and racial justice leader Coretta Scott King—all vegetarians or vegans.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.