This is a tribute to Gloria Steinem, and to the women who stood beside her, marched beside her, raised their voices alongside hers, and insisted upon something that should never have been radical: that being female did not determine the boundaries of one's humanity, intelligence, possibility, or place in the world.
It is also a tribute to the countless women whose names history may never record. Women who challenged what they had been taught about who they were supposed to be and questioned roles that had been assigned to them long before they had any voice in choosing those roles. They risked rejection, judgment, ridicule, and sometimes much more while claiming something that had always been theirs: their full personhood, their autonomy, and the right to define themselves.
Gloria Steinem emerged as perhaps the most publicly recognizable face and voice of the American women's movement, but the movement itself was never hers alone. She helped open a door, and she did not have to push against that door alone. Like-minded women joined her throughout that journey, adding their voices, their courage, their stories, and their determination to hers. Some of their names became part of history, including Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Betty Friedan, and many others. Countless more never became household names. Together, women pushed against boundaries that had defined their lives for generations, making it possible for those who followed to walk farther and imagine more.
Remembering the World They Were Challenging
It can be difficult today to fully appreciate the world in which Steinem began her work. When she entered journalism in the late 1950s and 1960s, women encountered newsrooms largely controlled by men and were frequently relegated to secretarial positions, research roles, or what were then called the "women's pages." Steinem herself recalled proposing political stories and discovering that editors simply did not envision her in that role (Michals, 2017/2026).
She continued anyway. Her 1963 undercover investigation of the working conditions of Playboy Bunnies brought her national attention, although she subsequently struggled to be taken seriously as a journalist. By 1968 she had helped establish New York magazine and was writing about politics and social issues. A year later, attending an abortion speak-out in New York became a turning point in her involvement with the women's movement. She later joined other feminist leaders in establishing the National Women's Political Caucus and helped create Ms. magazine, which brought conversations about women's lives into mainstream American culture (Michals, 2017/2026).
Yet the significance of what was happening cannot be understood through dates and accomplishments alone. Something much more fundamental was being challenged: Who had the authority to define what a woman was and what her life should become?
For generations, a woman's identity had too often been understood through her relationship to someone else. She was someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's caretaker. Her worth could become intertwined with beauty, obedience, sexual respectability, reproductive capacity, caregiving, or her ability to meet the needs of others. Her biology could be used not merely to describe her body, but to prescribe her possibilities.
The women of this movement challenged that prescription. They were not asking to have humanity bestowed upon them by some supposedly superior group. They were claiming what had always belonged to them: personhood, autonomy, intellectual authority, bodily integrity, and the right to participate in defining the meaning and direction of their own lives.
When the Private Became Speakable
One of the most consequential accomplishments of the women's movement was making public what generations of women had often been expected to experience privately. Discrimination, reproductive choice, sexual harassment, unequal opportunity, expectations within marriage, caregiving, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and the unequal distribution of power could finally be spoken about not simply as individual women's problems, but as experiences shaped by larger social structures.
Steinem understood the importance of women hearing one another's stories. Her own involvement in feminist activism deepened after attending the 1969 abortion speak-out, where women publicly described experiences that had largely been surrounded by silence. That recognition became an important part of her activism and writing (Michals, 2017/2026; Steinem, 2015). When an experience remains hidden, a woman may conclude that the difficulty belongs uniquely to her. When women begin speaking with one another, what seemed like an individual inadequacy can suddenly be understood within a much larger cultural context.
Once again, Steinem was not alone. Behind the recognizable photographs and famous names were women organizing in universities, workplaces, neighborhoods, homes, community centers, courtrooms, clinics, and living rooms. Some marched and organized publicly. Others challenged employers, institutions, husbands, fathers, religious expectations, cultural traditions, and family systems. Still others may never have described themselves as activists at all.
Their acts of resistance may have been quieter but no less meaningful. One woman returned to school. Another demanded equal pay. Another left an abusive relationship. Another refused sexual contact she did not want. Another decided that her daughter would have choices she herself had never been given. Another began questioning why being a "good woman" seemed to require sacrificing herself. Perhaps another, for the first time, stopped asking only what everyone else needed from her and allowed herself to ask what she wanted from her own life. These women, too, were participants in a changing understanding of what it meant to be female.
The Sexual-Self Was Part of the Revolution
As a sexologist, psychotherapist, researcher, and educator, this part of the feminist story holds particular meaning for me. The struggle for women's equality was never confined to entering universities, professions, workplaces, or political institutions previously dominated by men. It also entered one of the most intimate territories imaginable: a woman's relationship with her own body and her own sexual-self.
Questions that might appear deeply personal are inseparable from this history. Who determines what happens to a woman's body? Does she have the authority to say yes and the equal authority to say no? Can she experience desire without being judged for having too much of it, and can she experience little or no desire without believing she has failed someone? Can she experience pleasure without shame? Can she decide whether motherhood belongs in her life? Can she define her sexuality rather than having sexuality defined for her? Can she experience herself as a sexual person without being reduced to a sexual object?
These questions help us understand why sexual liberation was never simply about giving women greater freedom to have sex. At its deeper level, it involved women's ownership of their sexual-selves. It meant having greater authority to discover what desire, pleasure, intimacy, boundaries, attraction, embodiment, and sexuality meant within their own lives rather than simply inheriting definitions imposed by partners, families, cultures, institutions, media, or society.
That distinction remains important because reducing a woman to her sexual anatomy is itself a denial of the complexity of female sexuality. A woman's sexuality does not begin and end with genitalia, reproduction, sexual availability, or another person's pleasure. It exists within a whole human being, shaped by body and brain, emotions, relationships, attachment, culture, history, safety, meaning, identity, choice, and lived experience.
What I Still Hear in the Therapy Room
I have spent much of my professional life listening to women in the privacy of the therapy room. Decades after the women's movement transformed so much of our culture, I continue to hear echoes of questions earlier generations struggled to bring into public consciousness. Women still wonder who they are allowed to become, whether their bodies truly belong to them, whether they are permitted to want or not to want, whether they can establish boundaries without guilt, and whether disappointing someone they love means they have somehow failed as a woman, partner, daughter, mother, or human being.
This can be especially striking among highly accomplished women. A woman today may lead a company, practice medicine, teach at a university, build a business, support a family, or occupy positions her grandmother could scarcely have imagined, while privately struggling to believe that she has permission to rest, receive, desire, refuse, speak openly, or exist without continually proving her worth.
That contradiction reminds us that liberation does not occur only through legislation, professional opportunity, or social recognition. Cultural change can open possibilities while older expectations continue living inside us. A woman may walk through a door that previous generations fought to open and still carry within her the messages of a world that taught women to shrink themselves, silence themselves, prioritize everyone else, or distrust their own desires.
In that sense, some of the work of liberation continues internally. It appears in the gradual process of recognizing one's own voice, inhabiting one's body with greater ownership, understanding one's sexual-self without shame, developing boundaries, and discovering that autonomy and connection do not have to be opposites.
A Movement That Continued to Grow
To honor Gloria Steinem and the women of her generation does not require us to pretend that their movement was complete or represented every woman's experience equally. Feminism itself has had to listen, learn, and grow. Women do not experience womanhood through a single universal story. Race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic circumstances, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, migration, family systems, and many other aspects of human experience influence how freedom, sexuality, opportunity, discrimination, and constraint are lived.
Later generations have expanded feminist conversations by insisting that experiences previously underrepresented or excluded also be heard. This does not diminish the women who opened earlier doors. It reminds us that opening a door is not the same as completing the journey. Perhaps one sign that a movement remains alive is that the next generation does not merely inherit it. They question it, challenge its limitations, expand its understanding, and create room for people whose experiences still need to be recognized.
Steinem herself spent more than six decades writing, speaking, organizing, and supporting feminist and social justice causes. She co-founded organizations including the National Women's Political Caucus, the Women's Action Alliance, and the Women's Media Center, while remaining closely associated with Ms. throughout her life (Michals, 2017/2026). Her ability to move between journalism and grassroots organizing helped make her an unusually visible bridge between the movement and mainstream American culture.
The Women Who Walked Beside Her
Gloria Steinem died on September 2, 2026, at the age of 92. Her death understandably brings attention back to an extraordinary individual life, but perhaps one of the most appropriate ways to honor that life is to resist telling the history of feminism as though one extraordinary woman accomplished it alone. Steinem's work itself repeatedly emphasized organizing, listening, storytelling, and collective action.
There were women beside her and women before her. There were women who agreed with her and women who challenged her. There were women whose names became part of history and millions whose names never will. Their courage accumulated across generations. One woman spoke and another recognized herself in what she heard. That woman found the courage to speak, and somewhere else another woman began imagining a different future for herself or her daughter. Movements become transformative in precisely this way: they eventually become larger than any individual who helped give them a public face.
So this is indeed a tribute to Gloria Steinem, but it is also a thank-you to the women who stood beside her and to those who came before and after her. It belongs to the women who marched, organized, wrote, questioned, refused silence, and endured ridicule for ideas later generations would begin to take for granted. It also belongs to women whose resistance was so private that history will never know their names.
Gloria Steinem helped open a door, and she did not have to push against that door alone. Like-minded women joined her throughout the journey, bringing their voices, courage, stories, anger, hope, and determination. Together, they pushed against assumptions about what being female was supposed to mean, and generations of women have been able to walk farther because they did.
Perhaps our responsibility now is not simply to thank them for the doors they opened. It is to understand what it cost to open those doors, remember the women whose names disappeared from the story, and continue making the doorway wider for those who still encounter barriers to their autonomy and full participation in their own lives.
Ultimately, their struggle was never simply about allowing women to become more like men, compete with men, or occupy spaces once reserved for men. It was about something much more fundamental: the freedom of women to live as whole human beings, with voices of their own, bodies that belong to them, boundaries worthy of respect, choices about the direction of their lives, and sexual-selves that are theirs to discover and define.
Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts Gloria Steinem and the women who walked beside her leave behind. They challenged generations of women to move beyond being told who they were supposed to be and toward discovering who they actually were.
Thank you, Gloria, and thank you to the countless women who pushed against that door with you. Because of you, generations of women have walked through it. The journey continues.
Thank you for reading. If Gloria Steinem's story is part of your own story, too, I'd love to hear it in the comments below.
References
Michals, D. (2017, updated 2026). Gloria Steinem. National Women's History Museum.
Steinem, G. (2015). My life on the road. Random House.
