The Legacy of Gloria Steinem
Today, we lost a giant! Gloria Steinem has taken her rest.
Although, I did not call myself a feminist, I believed in every right the word was supposed to protect. I believed Black women deserved equal pay, safety inside our own homes, authority over our own bodies, and a seat at every table where decisions about our lives were being made. I couldn’t attach myself to a movement that often asked me to leave parts of myself at the door. The word feminist felt like an invitation into a house where I would always be a guest - but not a permanent resident.
My hesitation wasn’t stubbornness; it was based on feminism being presented as a movement built around the concerns of middle-class white women. Black women have always faced employment discrimination, racial violence, poverty, lack of childcare, involuntary sterilization, housing insecurity, and I distanced myself from the label of feminist because these issues were not always treated as feminist issues. Too often, Black women were asked to choose between racial justice and gender equality, as if there was no intersection between these two concepts.
Despite my lack of alignment with feminists, I have always loved and appreciated Gloria Steinem. In 1963, at twenty-eight, she went undercover at New York City's Playboy Club and spent roughly eleven days working as a Bunny for a two-part exposé in Show magazine. She documented low wages, sexual demands, exhausting conditions, and the physical requirements placed on women employees. Some editors reduced her to the costume she wore to get the story, and her professional credibility suffered for a time. The piece still stands as an example of what journalism can do when a reporter is willing to be underestimated. Gloria kept writing. She became a founding contributor and political columnist at New York magazine, which launched a year after I was born in 1968.
In 1972, she helped establish Ms., after a preview issue ran in New York. Ms. gave abortion, domestic violence, sexual harassment, childcare, workplace discrimination, and women's political representation a national platform for women’s voices to be heard. Ms. treated women as serious political thinkers, workers, and voters instead of creators of lifestyle articles.
I was proud to be published in Ms. in 2026 on domestic violence funding cuts for survivors. I will not pretend that my pride was simple because it was very complex. What I felt was closer to recognition: my words, my analysis, and my community's experience printed in a place that had decided our lives were worth serious attention. That is what a platform can do when someone holds the door open and does not gatekeep the doorframe.
Steinem did not build the Women’s movement alone, and she rarely suggested that she did. Gloria had no desire to be remembered as a savior; in fact, she allowed Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black feminist and community organizer, to shape her understanding of race, poverty, childcare, and organizing. The two traveled and spoke together through the 1970s, and their 1971 portrait, fists raised in solidarity, is currently at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
In 1971, Steinem helped found the National Women's Political Caucus alongside Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, and she supported Chisholm's historic 1972 presidential campaign. She also worked with Florynce Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Myrlie Evers-Williams, and she learned that Black women were never waiting to be let in. They were defining the terms of their futures.
That is the standard I grew up with, and the standard I still hold. I honor Gloria Steinem because she used her platform to expand the framework of feminism, while boldly saying the focus wasn’t inclusive and it stayed too narrow for too long. Both things are true. Refusing to say both is how history gets flattened, and Black women’s voices and experiences get erased. We have worked too hard to make progress by organizing against violence in our homes and our neighborhoods for several generations without claiming the feminist label. We did so without permission, and often without funding. Steinem's most meaningful legacy is not that she became the face of feminism. It is that she kept making room, and she kept insisting the room was not hers alone – she held the doors open for all women, and we thank her for that!
Rest In Power Ms. Steinem
(Photo Credit @Kevin Mazur / Getty Images)
Comments
Post a Comment