When news broke Thursday morning of Gloria Steinem’s peaceful passing in the Upper East Side apartment where she had lived for nearly six decades, I immediately thought about the hours I had spent in that very apartment just eight weeks prior. I was 16 days postpartum, and had managed to put real clothes on for the first time in weeks in order to sit in Steinem’s living room for one of her famous “talking circles.”
“What makes us know that we have something to say is that somebody listens,” Steinem told the 18 women journalists happily assembled on that dreary, rain-soaked summer evening. It was an apt message for a room of writers, delivered by a woman who began her storied career as a journalist. (Or as Gay Talese once said of her, “a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer.”)
In Steinem’s living room were women who had dedicated their professional lives to listening and making sure others knew that we — and our myriad sources — had something vital to say. She clearly wanted to impress upon us, as she wrote in her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” that “writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal.” To encounter Steinem, the 92-year-old writer, lecturer and icon of the modern feminist movement, was to love her, yes. But she also had an incredible way of making people, even strangers, feel intimately connected to her.
Our talking circle would be the last journalist community to gather in Steinem’s apartment before her death.
For Steinem, human connection was always at the heart of any efforts to create social, political or cultural change. This was insight gleaned through high-stakes personal experience.
Steinem first encountered the practice of talking circles while living in India after college, and later learned more about them from her friend and the former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller. In “My Life on the Road,” Steinem describes talking circles as “groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change.” She wrote that the practice was “the most important discovery of [her] life,” and in July, she impressed upon those of us present that when she was gone, her living room would remain a space for organizing. (Her home is in a trust with Gloria’s Foundation for this explicit purpose.)
For Steinem, human connection was always at the heart of any efforts to create social, political or cultural change. This was insight gleaned through high-stakes personal experience. In 1957, a London doctor risked his own livelihood to refer the then 22-year-old Steinem for an illegal abortion. “Do what you want to do with your life,” he made her promise at the time.
Steinem used that one wild and precious life well. She tirelessly advocated for reproductive rights, women’s financial independence, domestic violence prevention and workplace equity. She knew that the personal was political and the political deeply personal. “We’re not going to have a peaceful and democratic society until we have peaceful and democratic families,” she told the audience at a 2014 screening of “Private Violence,” a documentary she executive produced.
She was a born collaborator, organizing alongside the likes of Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and her work was always deeply intersectional. “If it’s white feminism, it’s not feminism,” she told Teen Vogue in 2016. She also understood that as a conventionally attractive white woman, she could use her visibility — and the way that powerful gatekeepers often underestimated and dismissed her — as a Trojan horse. She wanted to get the work done, and she could do that while wearing aviators and a chunky statement belt.
Steinem also knew that the work wouldn’t and couldn’t end with her generation. We are currently living through a sustained period of feminist struggle and backlash. The Equal Rights Amendment is still not in the Constitution. Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, has been overturned. The Trump administration is busy canceling grants dedicated to reducing teen pregnancy and excoriating women for delaying — or simply foregoing — marriage and babies. Women are leaving the workforce in droves. “I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell,” Steinem told The New York Times’ Jessica Bennett in 2022. “We are still dealing with the same issues.”
It’s hard to feel hopeful in such a moment, and the loss of a juggernaut like Steinem doesn’t help. But luckily Steinem and her contemporaries left a roadmap for the rest of us. She understood that true freedom always required interconnectedness over individualism.
In a 1971 New York Magazine piece, Steinem zeroed in on the idea of sisterhood. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke; that’s their natural and first weapon,” Steinem wrote. “She will need sisterhood.” That is the lesson of Steinem’s life’s work. We need one another.
“Start with love,” she urged us in July, taking the time to really look into each and every person’s eyes as she spoke. The message might have sounded trite coming from anyone but Steinem. She compared our gathering to sitting around a campfire — a ritual that evokes storytelling and easy familiarity. A campfire’s glow touches everyone around it, providing warmth and light beyond its edges, beckoning people to gather. This is also a fitting metaphor for Gloria Steinem and the outsize legacy she leaves behind: A trailblazer imbued with the kind of internal fire that not even death can extinguish.
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