09/06/2026
Today we mourn the loss of Gloria Steinem, whose life changed the shape of the feminist movement in the United States and far beyond it.
Gloria was a writer, organizer, editor, political strategist, and movement-builder. She helped make feminist ideas visible to millions and spent decades insisting that women’s equality was central to democracy, justice, peace, and human rights.
Gloria was not only a close friend, anti-war fellow activist and longtime political collaborator of our founder, Bella Abzug. She was part of the institutional history from which WEDO itself emerged.
In 1979, Gloria joined Bella and others in founding Women USA, created to strengthen women’s participation in public life and political decision-making. Women USA would become the institutional home from which WEDO grew.
Over the following decade, this work moved beyond women’s representation in U.S. politics toward how women could shape foreign policy, peace, economic justice, environmental policy, and international institutions.
In 1991, that political journey, alongside the global leadership of women like Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva and Thais Corral, helped give rise to WEDO. In 1995, Women USA formally became WEDO.
Gloria belongs to the generation of women whose organizing, friendships, political imagination, and institution-building created the ground on which WEDO stands today.
As she said: “The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.”
Movements are never built by one person. They are built through relationships, through people challenging and changing one another, and through one generation carrying forward what another began.
Today, as we remember Gloria Steinem, we honor not only an extraordinary individual, but the movement history she helped build and the collective work she believed in so deeply.
