Feminist Generation STatement on the Passing of Gloria Steinem

We honor the life of Gloria Steinem, a feminist journalist, activist, infrastructure builder, and champion of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine, the National Women's Political Caucus, and many other spaces. She advocated for abortion rights and constitutional gender equality. Her writing forced conversations on domestic violence, sexual harassment in the workplace, and much more, into the mainstream. Gloria Steinem dedicated her life to advocating for women’s rights. She played a crucial role in building the terrain upon which many of us organize today. She gave many women not only the personal strength to reject patriarchy but the political home to do so, especially at a time when women were viewed as objects and only able to access many basic rights through a man. Because of Steinmen and the spaces she helped build with hundreds of other women, women had access to power, survivor resources, credit, media, politics, and education they did not have before. Women’s work is often erased, as she wrote about. This is unacceptable as is anyone who continues to erase women as a political class who today are oppressed in intersecting and multi-scalar ways.

For decades, Gloria Steinem built a blueprint for feminist organizing alongside hundreds of other women and consistently uplifted leaders who were youth organizers, BIPOC women, and trans up until the end of her life, which organizers today can attest to. Gloria's legacy is rich, important, and complicated, as is the legacy of the U.S. second wave women's liberation movement. As we build a feminism that is intersectional, rooted, and winning for our generation, we reflect and learn from the contributions and contradictions of this chapter of US history. Her legacy of working for an organization connected to the CIA at a time of massive COINTELPRO and violent operations against liberation leaders, from the Black liberation movement to communists, is rightfully being called into conversation by organizers right now. We remain curious yet clear, and believe all of these realities are important lessons for us today as organizers, including how in the contemporary moment organizers are replicating these realities and the state is attempting to co-opt movements through influencers, oppression, genocide, and individualism. 

We remain firm in our belief that together our generation can build the mass feminist movement this country and this world needs, by doing it rooted and by doing it together. As a youth organization, Gloria Steinem is often the first figure young people learn about when it comes to women’s rights. We also know she critiqued this fiercely herself and in her honor we will not make her a deity but express deeply her human-ness, and with it, an analysis of her political actions. 

Alongside countless other feminist leaders including Pauli Murray, Shirley Chisholm, and Florynce Kennedy, Gloria Steinem popularized the Equal Rights Amendment and propelled a mass movement to demand equality, justice, and freedom for women. A movement we have taken on fully and fiercely through the #ERANow campaign. A fight that we continue to shape ourselves with our own contradictions. We are organizing day in and day out, and we are not giving up until we win. Women and LGBTQ+ people in this country are oppressed, subjected, attacked and denied basic human rights. This is compounded for women and LGBTQ+ at the intersection of other identities and struggles, like class, race, disability, and immigration status.

We honor Gloria Steinem’s legacy by organizing for the publication of the ERA, and uniting our generation to build true intersectional gender justice for all. This country needs a multiracial feminist working people’s democracy. Feminism must be central to that fight and the liberation of us all. Those who seek to minimize or erase patriarchy’s role in all local, national, and global systems are in fact enablers of it. This cannot stand. 

We are grateful, and may her life continue to inspire feminists to build the world, and the feminism they need. We will do it and show who we are in the work, the work of liberation. Women’s work.