‘Courage and contradictions’: what Gloria Steinem meant to feminist writers from around the world

I’m grateful for the role Gloria Steinem played from the 70s to the 90s Rebecca Solnit

Guardian US columnist and author

As far as I can tell, the US women’s movement was mostly clustered in coastal cities and university towns until Ms magazine , which Gloria Steinem cofounded and for many years co-managed, made it national. My mother in suburban California was an early subscriber and I was a tween who voraciously devoured every issue. I think it played a role in stiffening her resolve and her sense of her own rights, which led to her leaving my violent father.

Some of the hot takes I’m seeing now on Steinem, and the women’s movement she was at the heart of, act as reminders that a lot of people have no idea of what women’s lives were like before second-wave feminism. Of how women were routinely described as weaker, less intelligent, less rational and less objective than men, and therefore less believable, less qualified to work, testify, participate. No understanding of how utterly disempowered and excluded women were in both law and society, how women were rendered radically unequal economically in so many ways, including exclusion from professions and education and without rights to equal pay, to be free from workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. No memory of how marriage was a relationship of radical inequality in which a woman surrendered many rights and her identity to her husband, not even reserving the right to say no to sex until pressure from feminists made marital rape a crime in a growing number of American states in the 1970s and 1980s.

We now face a huge backlash, maybe even huger than the backlash we’ve always faced, but I believe feminism is just getting going in reversing not centuries but millennia of patriarchy, and I’m grateful for the role Gloria Steinem played in giving those decades of the 1970s to 1990s the transformative momentum that has made my life so much better, in so many ways, than my mother’s, let alone my grandmother’s.

French journalist, writer, film-maker, activist and Guardian Europe columnist

Gloria Steinem understood early on that the feminist struggle would be fought through the media as well as campaigning, and inspired generations of journalists, myself included. As co-founder of Ms magazine, the first in the US run entirely by women, she strengthened the connection between journalism and activism.

Gloria Steinem and the late author and activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 2014. Photograph: Scott Roth/Invision/APSteinem’s feminism was more attentive to race than that of many of her white contemporaries in the “second wave”. Her first explicitly feminist essay, After Black Power, Women’s Liberation, displays a keen understanding of the need to connect feminist struggles with other movements for justice. She wrote about poor women and mothers, and imagined an alliance between radical feminists, middle-class women and “poor women of all colors”, although some of the dated terminology may now appear offensive. Her relationships with prominent women of colour – including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Shirley Chisholm and Wilma Mankiller – informed every aspect of her work. As she acknowledged : “Personally, I learned feminism disproportionately from Black women.” In 1971, she served as treasurer of the fund for the legal defence of Angela Davis, the Black feminist philosopher unjustly prosecuted for murder who faced the death penalty.

Steinem leveraged her privilege as an educated white woman with access to elite media circles, but could not escape the dynamics of public life that made hers “the face of feminism” within a diverse and collective movement: the names of the women of colour who stood alongside her have not left the same imprint on public memory.

While I admired Steinem immensely, I regretted that her feminism remained so closely aligned with the Democratic party. This led her to defend Bill Clinton in 1998 and minimise Monica Lewinsky’s allegations, before acknowledging this failing two decades later. Her support for Hillary Clinton also exposed the limits of a feminism centred on representation.

But at a time of rising femonationalism (the use of women’s rights to advance nationalist and racist agendas), Steinem’s legacy reminds us of the urgent need for a feminism rooted in international solidarity and committed to fighting every form of oppression.

Gloria’s kindness and empathy were like steroids that strengthened us Mona Eltahawy

Egyptian-American journalist and author of the FEMINIST GIANT newsletter

A couple of days after Egyptian riot police assaulted me during a protest near Tahrir Square in November 2011, Gloria Steinem emailed me with news of what she called my “girl gang”: feminists and activists from around the world who had been writing to each other to find the best ways to support me. “No matter where you are, please tell me if there is anything at all I can do to make your life easier – or our outrage more effective, with friendship and empathy from your Girl Gang!” she signed off.

I had met Gloria just once, a month before, when the Hammer museum in Los Angeles hosted us for a feminist conversation in front of a live audience. She was a gracious interlocutor who treated me like a peer. We met several times since that conversation, each a reminder of the power of the feminist girl gang.

I was among a girl gang of 25 that she invited to send her questions for an Interview magazine column . My question was about us both being childfree by choice. “I would put the emphasis on ‘free’. It has increased my freedom,” she replied.

I am a feminist who will tell you to fuck off to your face. Kindness and empathy did not make it to my second book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. Gloria blurbed it thus: “Mona Eltahawy’s Necessary Sins is shocking, brave, gloriously unfeminine, and right on time … Reading it will free you, and acting on it will free us all.”

My “sins” – anger, profanity, violence etc – are necessary in our fight against patriarchy. Gloria’s kindness and empathy were like steroids that strengthened us for that fight: batons she passed across feminist generations and borders – and especially vital when that fight against patriarchy leaves us bruised, with broken limbs, and broke. She lent me $1,000 during a particularly tight financial time and I was mortified at how long it took me to repay her. She was unfazed.

Farewell, Gloria. To quote your 2011 email: “you should see the … loving outpouring from your girl gang from around the world!”

American playwright and activist

I will always be grateful to Gloria for her early support of my play The Vagina Monologues . After she came to see me perform in a little theatre way downtown, she agreed to write the foreword to the book. She showed up decking her red boa at every event we held early on to birth the V-Day movement to end violence against women, gender-expansive people and girls – now 30 years old – into the world. The Vagina Monologues was very outside the mainstream at the time and her support of it helped other people be brave.

Gloria Steinem, Glenn Close and V at a V-Day benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues in New York, 2001. Photograph: Darla Khazei/Associated PressShe did that same thing for so many women, catalysing their dreams, their visions, their advocacy, their emerging non-profits by lending her support, her strategy, her kindness.

It’s not lost on me that Gloria left this world in the midst of one of the greatest periods of attacks on women’s rights – the destruction of maternal health care; women being forced out of the labour market in the hundreds of thousands, especially Black women; the siege on reproductive rights; rape academies emerging online; the Epstein files still not being prosecuted; and having a convicted felon as president who has been found liable in a civil court for sexual abuse. But if Gloria had anything, she had stamina and infinite hope, and she would want us to remember that the backlash is an indication of our victories and our power.

Now we need to go beyond where we’ve been, to new imaginings in order to fight off the racist, fascist, capitalist patriarchy that is actively working to kill our world.

It is impossible to write the history of the women’s movement without her Julia Gillard

Former Australian prime minister and former leader of the Australian Labor party. She was the first woman to hold either position

I am deeply saddened by the passing of feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Gloria was at the vanguard of the women’s rights movement as a political activist, journalist and editor, writer and thinker for more than 60 years. It is impossible to write the history of the women’s movement without her name being at the centre of the narrative. Indeed, her name is synonymous with feminism.

I felt incredibly fortunate to interview Gloria in 2022 for A Podcast of One’s Own . Then 88, Gloria was as passionate as ever about achieving equality and advocating for others. I greatly admired her steadfast commitment to the cause, even when progress was not linear, and backwards steps were taken – especially for reproductive freedom in the United States.

Gloria’s dedication to equality and empowerment for women everywhere, and from all walks of life, will continue to endure around the world. Her legacy is now ours to take forward. My heartfelt condolences go out to Gloria’s family and friends.

She was the truth-teller who inspired my grandmother, my mother – and me Jennifer Robinson

When I heard the news Gloria Steinem had died, everything stopped.

I had just walked out of the Sydney opening of our documentary, Silenced , which is about the legal backlash against #MeToo and how the law silences women from speaking out about abuse. Women were walking out of the cinema crying and angry about how far we still have to go – and activated about what we need to do to change it.

And then we were hit with the news that we had lost Steinem. The news spread by hushed whispers through in the crowd in front of me. The grief was palpable.

Steinem, the silence-breaker. The truth-teller who had inspired millions of women around the world to find our voices and use them. The woman who inspired my grandmother, my mother – and me. My grandmother is a survivor of domestic violence and later worked in the women’s refuge movement to make it easier for the women and children who came after her. She is in our film because her work inspired mine. I grew up hearing my grandmother quote Steinem and, whenever I speak – including the other night in Sydney – her words and her ideas can be found.

It hit me hard. I had to take a moment. I wanted to cry. But then I looked around at the sea of women in front of me – victim-survivors, frontline services workers, lawyers from women’s legal services, and engaged and concerned community members, inspired to help create the change we need for women.

It was beautiful. And it made me think of one of my favourite Steinem quotes: “People are always asking me, ‘Who will you pass the torch to?’ The question makes me angry. There is no one torch – there are many torches – and I’m using my torch to light other torches.”

In her lifetime, she lit so many torches – all over the world – including in me and among the women gathered with me in Sydney the other night. What an incredible legacy.

As she said, “The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement of people is only people moving.” The best way to celebrate and honour her legacy is to continue it – and keep moving.

She passionately wanted to connect local, national and global feminisms Elif Shafak

British-Turkish novelist and political scientist

In my mid-20s I left Istanbul to become a fellow in women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. I arrived without knowing a single soul, entranced by the splendour of autumnal colours in Boston. The libraries there hold one of the best archives in the US on the history of feminist theory and practice, and, as winter descended, I burrowed myself into reading Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison … and that was when I properly discovered Gloria Steinem.

Steinem had an unconventional, nomadic upbringing, and until she was 11 she had not spent a full year at school. In the absence of stable education, it was books – including Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – that helped and guided her. “I was rescued by librarians,” she would explain later.

Gloria Steinem in her New York City flat, November 1990. Photograph: Barbara Alper/Getty ImagesI was struck by the courage she had shown in exposing the reality of the shiny world of Playboy bunny clubs, and the magazine she co-founded, Ms, never shied from covering difficult issues, such as sex trafficking and sexual harassment. But it was her books that stayed with me: Moving Beyond Words, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Marilyn: Norma Jean …

Steinem believed that any meaningful change had to grow like a tree. From the bottom up. She not only founded women’s organisations and became a leading voice in second-wave feminism, she also saw the women’s movement as her chosen family. She said she had learned feminism from Black women. For her, race and gender were inextricably connected: “It is not possible to be a feminist without being anti-racist.” She was equally cognisant of class barriers. She passionately wanted to connect local, national and global feminisms.

When people asked her how she managed to remain optimistic, she said it was because she did not stay in one place. Just like in her childhood, she kept travelling. “Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a women will be a self-willed journey – and to be welcomed when she comes home.”

She was not perfect and not always right, and we also need to be able to talk about that – in a calm and nuanced way. Her contribution to generations of civil rights and women’s rights has been immense and genuine. Gloria Steinem would have made a fascinating character in a novel – with her resilience, her courage, her determination, her trailblazing and her contradictions.

British Guardian columnist

I first encountered Gloria Steinem in much the same way as I met her feminist contemporaries – on my mother’s bookshelves, which I ransacked. Although as a teenage girl in the late 1990s I had very much swallowed the post-feminist narrative (much to my mother’s disappointment) that the women’s movement had accomplished all it needed to, I still read every book for adult women that I could get my hands on. I credit Steinem’s undercover Playboy Bunny piece – which was extracted in one of the books – with the fact that I started to question the raunch culture that was all around me (and never bought a Playboy T-shirt). That is the power of good journalism – it echoes through the decades.

I found Steinem again at university, in the aftermath of a violent attack that galvanised me, as it can so many women, and have been a great admirer ever since. When I was in my 20s, setting up my own feminist magazine – the Vagenda – her work was a big influence. Her vocal and inclusive activism, her willingness to reflect on her missteps, her sense of humour and her refusal to give up the fight even when times were very dark indeed have all been an inspiration.

Her book dedication to the British doctor who granted her an abortion at the age of 22 despite it not then being legal – in which she writes “I’ve done the best that I could with my life”, as she had promised him he would – struck a chord with so many for a reason: it’s a profoundly moving testament to the freedom that access to abortion grants a woman, even more so in the aftermath of the repeal of Roe v Wade. I find it so very sad that Steinem leaves a world where reproductive rights remain under severe threat. She devoted her life to this and other crucial questions of women’s liberation. She would not give up the fight, and nor must we. Onwards, in her honour.