Alive at the Same Time - Remembering Gloria Steinem

I woke up this morning to learn that Gloria Steinem had died, and I began to cry.

Gloria too?

Dolly. Tim. Now Gloria. Losing our most beloved matriarchs and icons at precisely the moment we seem to need them most. It feels like one punch after another, delivered during a time of extraordinary crisis and a renewed, relentless war on women.

Gloria was ninety-two. By the measure of a human life, that is a long time. But this morning, it does not feel long enough.

I am deeply saddened that I never had the opportunity to meet Gloria in person. I so wish I had.

But as I sit here remembering, I realize that I was in virtual rooms with her during COVID, through gatherings connected to Ms. and other organizations. I heard her speak while she was still here, still gathering women, still doing the work.

Though I didn’t meet her in person, I am so grateful to have shared that space with her.

She has been an icon throughout my life, as she has been for so many people. Gloria Steinem helped change what women could say, demand, publish, organize, and become. She paved a way not only for women, but for all of us, because every expansion of human freedom expands what is possible for everyone.

I have read her books, but My Life on the Road reached me differently. I have spent so much of my own life on the road, and Gloria understood something I had felt long before I knew how to articulate it: the road is not simply the distance between destinations. It is where the work happens.

The road is where we listen. It is where we collect stories, recognize patterns, meet the person carrying a piece of something we have been trying to understand, and connect people who might create change together.

I don’t simply travel to give a keynote or attend an event. I gather people. I remember their stories. I notice who should know whom. I carry an idea from a conversation in Brooklyn to a retreat at Omega to a room in Chicago, and then I try to turn it into something that might move people toward change.

Gloria helped me understand that gathering is itself a form of power.

Just days ago, I was talking about her with my friend Julia (who called me and said you MUST read My Life on the Road when it came out), and she is one of the women with whom I continually relight torches. Julia had recently taken her daughter to see Gloria in New York. There it was: a matrilineal line made visible.

Gloria. Julia. Julia’s daughter. Me.

One woman lighting another woman’s torch, who lights another and another, not so that any one of us must carry all the light, but so there will always be more of it.

Last night, I watched the trailer for the new George Michael documentary. I have been listening to Dolly on rotation this past week, and Prince is always swirling purple around me. And now, this morning, I find myself thinking about how astonishing it is that I have been alive at the same time as these monumentally wonderful, beautiful people.

We all die. That is the bargain.

But I got to be here when Prince was making music. I got to hear Dolly sing and watch her turn generosity into infrastructure. I got to witness George Michael bring that voice, that beauty, that defiance, and that magnificent sass into the world. I got to live during the lifetime of Gloria Steinem. And I am here with all of you beautiful people.

These people did not merely entertain or inspire me. They left fingerprints on the person I became and am becoming. As do you.

I wear purple because of Prince and, more than that, he taught me that creative freedom is worth fighting for and that becoming more fully yourself is a revolution.

I ask myself, What would Dolly do?

I bring women together in circles because Gloria showed us what becomes possible when women can see and hear one another.

And every time I walk onto a stage, I carry at least a little George Michael sass with me.

My new favorite author, Meggan Watterson, says that the body is the soul’s chance to be alive in this moment.

Perhaps that is why I am thinking so much about these extraordinary souls and the treasures they left behind: their books, songs, work, voices captured on video, and photographs that allow us to look into their eyes again.

Their souls continue to surround us. To buoy us. To remind us that there is always another opportunity to make a better way. To bring joy. To inspire. To choose, for whatever time we are given here, to be empathetic, courageous, beautiful, joyful human beings.

And the time we get here is so very short.

I have many favorite photographs of Gloria, but the one I return to is the famous portrait of her standing beside Dorothy Pitman Hughes, their fists raised together.

The photograph was taken in 1971.

The year I was born.

While Gloria and Dorothy were traveling the country, asking women to imagine a freer and more equal world, I was just arriving in it.

Perhaps that is part of why the image has always felt so powerful to me. It captures the world being prepared for my generation, the possibilities these women were creating before we were old enough to understand what they had risked for us.

Dorothy was an experienced Black feminist, writer, community organizer, and childcare activist, and Gloria’s friend and speaking partner. Together, they spoke about feminism, racism, economic justice, families, and the power women could build in solidarity.

That photograph matters because Gloria is not standing alone. Dorothy helped Gloria find her public speaking voice.

Two women. Two raised fists. A Black woman and a white woman insisting that the liberation of women could not be separated from racial and economic justice.

No spectacle. No performance.

Just solidarity. Strength. Resolve. Faith.

It is the faith required to stand beside another woman and work toward a future neither of you may live to see.

And perhaps that is the image I need most now. Not one heroic woman carrying the movement by herself, but women standing together, each raising her own fist, each bringing her own history, each refusing to leave the other to fight alone.

I entered the world beneath those raised fists.

Now, fifty-five years later, both women are gone, and I am one of the women still here.

I think about that more now that I am in my fifties. Some of what I am working to change may not change in my lifetime. Some of the seeds I plant may not break through the ground while I am here to witness them.

And I am okay with that. We stand on the shoulders of so many who did not see the change they made for us in their lifetimes.

It makes the actions I can take while I am embodied more urgent. More purposeful. More sacred. I want to use whatever time I have to make a better way, even if I never get to walk all the way down it. 

We are losing the women who walked ahead of us. I do not believe the Source is telling us to surrender. I believe we are being reminded that it is time for the matriarchy to rise, to write, gather, organize, speak, vote, create, protect, and keep lighting one another’s torches.

Thank you to those of you who stand next to me; you know who you are. I am grateful for you.

And we need more of us to light it up; we are here.

Gloria. Even her name means glory, something radiant, magnificent, and worthy of praise.

So today I am thinking of her as Saint Gloria. Not canonized by a church, but sanctified through a lifetime spent widening the circle of human freedom. One of the mothers of our matriarchal feminist revolution. A woman who used her one embodied life to create greater freedom for millions of people she would never meet.

I am heartbroken that she is gone. But more than that, I am overwhelmingly grateful that our lives overlapped.

We were alive at the same time.

Rest in peace, Saint Gloria.

We will raise our fists alongside yours, and Dorothy’s, Dolly’s, Tim’s, and Prince's.

And we will keep going.

Twenty Ways Gloria Steinem Changed the World

This could never be a complete accounting of Gloria’s ninety-two years, but here are twenty reasons to say her name with gratitude:

1. She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and exposed the exploitation and degrading working conditions women endured inside the Playboy Club.
2. She helped launch New York magazine in 1968 and brought women’s lives, political movements, and social inequality into serious mainstream journalism.
3. After covering a 1969 abortion speak-out, she publicly acknowledged her own abortion and made reproductive freedom central to her life’s work.
4. She testified before the United States Senate in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
5. She helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, and other leaders determined to bring more women into political power.
6. She co-founded Ms. magazine, creating a national platform through which women could tell the truth about their own lives.
7. Through Ms., she helped bring subjects including domestic violence, sexual harassment, date rape, reproductive freedom, and workplace discrimination into public conversation.
8. She helped establish the Women’s Action Alliance, which connected and supported feminist organizations and activists across the country.
9. She helped create the Ms. Foundation for Women, one of the first foundations dedicated to funding work led by and for women and girls.
10. She helped found Voters for Choice, building political power around reproductive freedom.
11. She co-founded Choice USA, now known as URGE to develop and support a new generation of reproductive-justice leaders.
12. Through the Ms. Foundation, she helped bring Take Our Daughters to Work Day into the national consciousness, encouraging girls to imagine themselves occupying every kind of workplace and position of influence.
13. She co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan to increase women’s visibility, authority, and representation in media.
14. She spent decades fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, refusing to accept that equality under the Constitution should remain unfinished business.
15. She traveled and organized with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, demonstrating that feminism had to confront racism, classism, childcare, violence, and economic inequality.
16. She continually credited Black, Indigenous, and other women of color whose leadership shaped the feminist movement, even when the media disproportionately centered her.
17. She used books including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Revolution from Within, and My Life on the Road to give generations of people language for experiences they had been taught to endure silently.
18. She treated listening as a form of activism and spent much of her life traveling to campuses, community centers, political gatherings, and living rooms to hear people’s stories.
19. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
20. She continued writing, organizing, mentoring, and convening talking circles into the final years of her life, still bringing people together, still working for equality, still lighting torches.

Thank you, Gloria.

Your Homework. The Gratitude Gift.

One more thing.

Don’t wait.

Don’t wait until someone dies to tell them that their life changed yours.

When people write books, publish essays, create music, make art, build communities, organize movements, or stand on stages, they do it because something in their soul is asking to be given form. They rarely know how far their work travels. They may never hear about the person who found courage in their words, danced through heartbreak to their song, or made a different choice because of their example.

I believe Gloria can feel the love being sent to her today. I believe Dolly and Tim can too. I believe they know what they meant to us.

But people are still here, doing beautiful and courageous work, and they need to hear it now.

So, in addition to posting about Gloria, tell someone living who inspires you what they mean to you.

Send the text. Write the email. Mail the letter. Leave the comment. Send the Magic 8 Ball. Bring the flowers to the Stage Door. Buy the book. Share the art. Say the thing.

Tell them specifically what their work gave you.

Encourage them to continue creating. To continue gathering. To continue being brave. To continue raising their fists. Remind them that what they are doing matters, even if they cannot yet see the difference it is making.

Let some of the love arrive while there is still a body here to receive it.

That is our work as light workers. We do not merely remember the light after it is gone. We carry it to the next person.

Light the next torch.

You are the spark.

Photo: Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, photographed by Dan Wynn in 1971.