03/09/2026
Friends, it has been an unusual time as we have lost 3 stellar public figures who have been trailblazers right to the very end. In a span of 30 days, we have lost Yayoi Kusama, Dolly Parton, and now, Gloria Steinem.
Many of this week's obituaries will begin with recognising Gloria co-founding of Ms. magazine, and rightly so. She proved that there was an audience for a magazine which championed women's rights. Gloria was a working journalist long before she was an icon. In 1963 she took a job as a Pl***oy Bunny and wrote about what she found there: the poor pay, the required gynaecological examination, the shoes, the aching feet, the thin coat of glamour over very ordinary exploitation. But this reporting cost her. For a time afterwards, serious assignments became harder to get. She had exposed the way women were reduced to s*xual stereotypes, only to find herself trapped inside one.
She went on to help build things - The Ms. Foundation for Women. The National Women's Political Caucus. The Women's Action Alliance. The Women's Media Center.
She also wrote one of the great essays about an older woman, though it is rarely described that way. Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It) is about her mother, a gifted journalist who gave up her work, became unwell, and spent years being treated by nearly everyone around her as an embarrassment rather than a casualty. Gloria's insight was that her mother's life had not been a private misfortune. It was what the system produced. Anyone who works with older women will recognise Ruth. We meet her constantly: the woman whose gifts were sacrificed and then forgotten.
Then, in 1974, a reporter told her she didn't look forty. She replied that this is what forty looks like. It was an offhand line. And she spent the next five decades on that question. Doing Sixty, written at sixty, described turning fifty as leaving a much-loved country and turning sixty as arriving at the border of a new one, where she intended to trade moderation for excess. Doing Seventy followed. Her central claim, which she repeated for the rest of her life, was that men tend to rebel young and grow conservative with age, while women do the reverse and become more radical as they get older. Not in spite of the ageism they meet, but partly because of it.
She lived her belief. She married for the first time at 66. At 81 she joined women peace activists, including two Nobel Peace laureates, in crossing the Korean Demilitarised Zone. At 82 she stood on a stage in Washington in front of half a million people. She kept travelling and organising. Through her eighties and into her nineties she was doing precisely what women are told to stop doing somewhere around fifty-five.
She refused the script that says a woman's public life has a use-by date, and she named ageing as a political condition rather than a personal decline. For the older women we work alongside, the ones losing their housing, their jobs, their savings and their safety while being told they are simply unlucky, that reframing is critical.
She got things wrong, was challenged by younger women and by women of colour, and to her credit, she kept listening and understanding.
Thank you and RIP Gloria Steinem.
