Marion Steinmann, author and award-winning writer and editor for Life magazine, dies at 92

Marion Steinmann, 92, of Chestnut Hill, a former award-winning reporter and editor at the original Life magazine, author, and freelance writer who specialized in science, health care, and medical stories, died Wednesday, April 6, of complications from aspiration at Bishop White Lodge at Cathedral Village nursing and rehabilitation center.

The editor of her high school newspaper in Rochester, N.Y., and the women’s editor for the Cornell Daily Sun, Ms. Steinmann joined the staff at Life in 1950 and worked as a reporter, writer, assistant editor, and associate editor until it ceased weekly publication in 1972.

She studied microbiology, graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, now the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and wrote mostly about science and medicine during the last half of Life’s golden age of literary influence.

In 1971, she won an American Medical Association journalism award for an article called “Fighting the Genetic Odds.”

She also covered archaeology and history, and published a story in Life on Oct. 22, 1965, called “When America was called Vinlanda” in which she took the Vikings to task. “The Vikings had a notoriously poor eye for their own place in history as the discoverers of the New World,” she wrote. “When they set foot on a strange shore, it simply never entered their horn-helmeted heads to build a monument to attest the fact.”

She was promoted from reporter to writer and editor in 1963 under Life managing editor George P. Hunt, and her name appeared as an associate editor in Life’s final edition of Dec. 29, 1972.

In 1978, she published Island Life with Time-Life Films. Based on the 1970s TV series Wild, Wild World of Animals, the 128-page book featured photos and interesting information about such tropical wildlife as lemurs, mudskippers, crabs, tortoises, and flightless birds.

In 1982, she published the American Medical Association Book of BackCare, and a 1985 review by Zoltan Szaraz in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association concludes: “This book is worthwhile reading.” In conjunction with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she published A Parent’s Guide to Allergies and Asthma in 1992 and cowrote the Guide to Common Childhood Infections in 1998.

Her most notable book was published in 2005. Women at Work: Demolishing a Myth of the 1950′s is a 328-page examination of how 191 women in Cornell’s Class of 1950 fared in the workplace after graduation. Debunking the idea that women in the 1950s were overwhelmingly relegated to housework, Ms. Steinmann’s survey found that 44% of her respondents worked outside the home or attended graduate school for at least five years in that decade.

“This book should serve as a welcome reminder that the U.S. is not a uniform society, and that what holds true for many of its members by no means holds true for them all,” reviewer Piri Halasz wrote in 2010.

Ms. Steinmann wrote many freelance articles after she left Life about health care, medicine, and other topics for the New York Times Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Smithsonian magazine, Cornell Alumni News, and other publications. She also coedited 2015′s Curfews, Chaos and Champions: The Unique Story of the Cornell class of 1950, by Brad Edmonson.

Born July 1, 1929, in Rochester, Ms. Steinmann graduated from Cornell in 1950 after attending as a scholarship recipient in the prestigious National Scholars Program. Ever adventurous, she climbed with a friend to a summit on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania when she was 40, and married Charles Joiner, an author and professor of political science at Temple University, when she was 50.

The couple lived in Chestnut Hill, but she kept her apartment in New York, and they attended concerts, visited museums, and were active at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, the Science and Art Club of Germantown, and the Chestnut Hill Community Association. He died in 2015.

Ms. Steinmann suffered a stroke in 2015, but she continued to read and keep up with current events at Cathedral Village. “She was obviously very accomplished in her writing and her life,” said her sister, Elinor Schrader. “She was also a very supportive sister.”

In addition to her sister, Ms. Steinmann is survived by other relatives.

No services are planned.