Gloria Steinem died unexpectedly on Wednesday night in her New York City apartment at age 92. Publicly active until very recently and on the verge of publishing her eighth book, An Unexpected Life, on September 22, it seemed she would live forever. More to the point, we who consider ourselves feminists needed her to live forever.
“Gloria” and “feminism” were synonymous, and therefore, how are we—women who care about our equal rights and freedoms—to forge ahead without her? Our mother-figure, our avatar, has left us to fend for ourselves as we march our troops, interest groups, and Insta feeds to the front lines of Donald Trump’s War on Women. We are now facing the biggest rollback of women’s rights since Gloria and her second-wave feminist compatriots first took to the streets in the late 1960s, so it is high time to take Gloria’s memory and example and run with it.
I last saw Gloria just five months ago, in April, at a gathering in her Upper East Side apartment, where she had lived for decades. A museum to her glamorous, purposeful life, her townhouse apartment is furnished with comfortable chairs, worn Persian carpets, and paintings of Hindu goddesses. It is the place where, in her dotage, Gloria traded her incessant traveling the country for meeting with groups of women and having those women—of every stripe—come to her. Gloria opened our meeting as she always does, by asking everyone in our group (women involved with feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum) to introduce ourselves. This was emblematic of Gloria’s inclusive style: listen, deflect attention from herself, and encourage women to find their own voices—to find the strength to speak up and act. Over the years, Gloria probably hosted hundreds of women’s speaking circles at her apartment, but in the past two or three, she was on overdrive. She must have known that her time to help women learn how to help themselves was running out.
My private purpose for attending the meeting was to bring Gloria a copy of the recently published paperback version of my book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973. I had interviewed Gloria (along with 100 others) for the book years earlier, but this was the first chance I had to sit down with her with a copy of the paperback.
She instantly gravitated to the photo insert, and we started flipping through the glossy black-and-white pictures together. The first few pages featured Gloria’s predecessors. There was Pauli Murray (1910-1985), the brilliant Black lawyer and co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) who coined the term Jane Crow, and Representative Martha Griffith (1912-2003) who spearheaded the legislative effort to include “sex” in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, effectively launching the campaign for women’s equality in the workforce. The 28 original NOW founders sat in their proper skirts, stockings, and pumps at their first meeting in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1965.
It would take a few more pages and years to get to Gloria’s start in the movement. She first appears in a Jill Krementz photograph sitting on a New York sidewalk with Kate Millett in 1971. Millett, the brilliant author of Sexual Politics (1970), flamed out of the movement in the 1970s and traded feminist activism for growing Christmas trees on her farm in upstate New York. She died in 2017. In another photograph, Gloria is at a press conference at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, with New York Representatives Bella Abzug (1920-1998), Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005), as well as Feminine Mystique author and NOW founder Betty Friedan (1921-2006).
Gloria slowed down when she got to the 1973 photo of Margaret Sloan (1947-2004), her close friend and co-speaker who traveled with Gloria for years, spreading the multiracial feminist word. At this point, I noticed that Gloria was becoming emotional. Her voice cracked and got wispier when she turned to the photo of Florence “Flo” Kennedy (1916-2000), dressed in her signature boa and cowboy hat. Kennedy, another close friend of Gloria’s, was a lawyer and civil rights and feminist activist who was famous for her ribald, outrageous statements. Kennedy devoted much of her life to a common cause with Gloria—building bridges between Black and white feminists. Together with Sloan and others, Kennedy founded the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973, a crowning achievement for Black feminists.
As Gloria finished flipping through the photos, a palpable moment of understanding passed between us: Almost all of her dear friends and sisters-in-arms were gone. Gloria was the last woman standing. She was the survivor. At that moment, in that room, it seemed as if Gloria was the last living second-wave feminist.
But she and I both knew that was not exactly true. Many women now in their eighties and nineties who played foundational roles in the movement, from advancing women’s health, political engagement, reproductive rights, representation in sports, academia, business, journalism, and the arts, are still alive and active. But none of them have Gloria’s impeccable communication skills or her ability to rise above ideological, class, and race-related disagreements that have divided so many older and modern-day feminist leaders and organizations. Gloria had the advantage over her hundreds of compatriots of being born with beauty and a way with words.
After Smith College, where she graduated in the class of 1956 and a stint in India, she started her career as a journalist in New York City, assigned to fashion and puff pieces. Her considerable talent led to more serious work at Clay Felker’s new New York magazine. Meanwhile, early feminist pioneers had already spent many years fighting the myriad, mountain-sized barriers that systemically denied women political, economic, cultural, and social power. It was not until Gloria covered a speak-out for abortion rights in Greenwich Village organized by the radical feminist group Redstockings in March 1969 that she considered joining the movement. There, Gloria had her now-famous epiphany: The personal is political, and the collective power of women telling their stories can change the world. Gloria had never told a soul about her much earlier abortion in London, and watching women stand up in public telling their harrowing abortion stories raised Gloria’s conscience and changed her life.
The feminist movement was ready for Gloria when she came onto the scene in 1970. Representative Abzug, seeing that Gloria was a much more appealing spokeswoman for the movement than the angry, frumpy Betty Friedan, pushed Gloria to the front of the line. She found herself booked on talk shows, testifying in front of Congress for the ERA, founding the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, appearing on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1971, founding Ms. magazine in 1972, and leading the delegation of feminists to the 1972 Democratic convention where they tried and failed to include abortion rights in the party’s platform.
Though Gloria was always reluctant to be the front woman for a huge, diverse movement, her warm personality, nimble sense of humor, and radiant beauty made her a magnet for the male-dominated press, and she quickly became a worldwide feminist celebrity. But most of all, Gloria was an inveterate organizer who spent her adult life on the road listening to groups of women across the country and urging them to change their lives and communities. When most second-, third-, and fourth-wave feminists retreated from the spotlight, or were caught up in internal conflict, Gloria managed to rise above the fray and keep the faith of advancing, voice by voice, meeting by meeting, women’s collective agency.
Ever since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the rise of the manosphere and trad wives, and the second Trump administration’s adherence to the Heritage Foundation Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist agenda, women like the ones in my group have turned to Gloria for advice. Her answer was always the same: keep meeting, talking, organizing, and fighting. She shunned the idea that feminists need one leader, because our power is our diversity and collective action.
After each of us took our selfies and tearfully thanked Gloria for her leadership, we walked down the narrow stairway out of her apartment and onto Lexington Avenue, knowing we might never see her again. Now we mourn this woman who represented an era, a movement, and a state of mind. This angel from Toledo, Ohio, came to this earth to teach the gospel of sisterhood, and in her memory, women young and old, Black, Brown, and white, rich and poor, need to unite to preserve the rights that Gloria and the sisterhood fought so hard for.
