03/09/2026
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On Jan. 21, 2017, one day into Donald Trump’s tenure as president of the U.S., and roughly five decades into Gloria Steinem’s tenure as its most famous feminist, Steinem arrived on the National Mall to address the Women’s March on Washington—a mass gathering in rebuke of both a president who had bragged about groping women, and the society that had elected him anyway.
At age 82, Steinem looked as she had always looked, only older: tinted aviator glasses, leather jacket, long hair parted down the middle with two lightened streaks at the front. And she sounded like she had always sounded: resolute but coolheaded and—even amid great trepidation—adamantly joyful, too.
Steinem—who died Wednesday at home, according to a post on her Instagram account—was, by then, a living symbol of the women’s movement, having spent her life working, as a journalist, editor, activist and organizer, to brazenly propel women forward and cannily scrutinize the forces holding them back. She was arguably the most effective avatar of a movement that was meant to represent half the population of Earth—and, aware of the peculiarity and pressures of that position, held fast to a conviction that all people were equal and interdependent, and that change comes only from collective action.
When people asked her who she was passing the torch to, she bristled: “There is no one torch—there are many torches,” she told the New Yorker in 2015, “and I’m using my torch to light other torches.”
Read more: https://on.wsj.com/4gUIUAi
