What We Inherited—and Forgot

Gloria Steinem, the unfinished work of equality and the danger of mistaking hard-won freedoms for the natural order

When Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at the age of 92, the news carried the peculiar weight of losing someone whose influence had become both immense and increasingly difficult to see. She was immediately and correctly remembered as a journalist, author, organizer, co-founder of Ms. magazine and one of the defining voices of the modern women’s movement. Tributes described the laws she helped change, the organizations she helped establish and the conversations she forced into public life at a time when much of women’s experience was still expected to remain private. Yet the truest measure of her influence may lie in freedoms that no longer appear to bear her fingerprints at all: the woman who opens a bank account in her own name, earns a living without considering herself an exception, decides whether or when to marry, expects to participate in decisions about her own body, leaves a relationship that has become intolerable, runs for public office or simply assumes that the direction of her life belongs to her. None of these possibilities was created by Steinem alone, and she never claimed otherwise. They emerged from generations of women—many of them less famous, many excluded from the histories eventually written—who organized, argued, testified, resisted and refused to accept that inequality was merely the natural arrangement of the world. Steinem’s particular gift was to help make their private recognitions public, their scattered objections collective and their demands impossible to dismiss as the grievances of a few dissatisfied women.

That work was never directed at women alone. Equality cannot be built by one half of society, while the other half watches approvingly from a safe distance, and it cannot survive if men understand their role, primarily as granting women permission to enter spaces they once controlled. The world Steinem spent her life imagining required women to recognize their own authority, but it also required men to reconsider what they had been taught about theirs. It asked them to distinguish strength from dominance, partnership from benevolence and respect from the belief that a woman’s freedom should remain comfortably compatible with male approval. It did not require men to apologize for every arrangement they inherited or to accept caricatures of themselves as obstacles to women’s progress. It required something more useful: that they notice how power continues to operate in ordinary life, refuse the advantages that depend upon women having less of it and participate in relationships, workplaces and institutions in which equality is practised rather than ceremonially endorsed.

This is where Steinem’s legacy remains unexpectedly contemporary. The more obvious exclusions have become socially unacceptable in much of public life, but the assumptions beneath them have hardly disappeared. They surface when a woman presents herself through her work, education or ideas and is answered with an appraisal of her appearance; when professional confidence is admired in a man but interpreted as arrogance in a woman; when a father is praised for “helping” with responsibilities a mother is simply expected to carry; when a woman’s account of pain, harassment or exhaustion is treated as provisional until someone else confirms it; or when her refusal is received not as information but as the opening position in a negotiation. None of these moments alone resembles the great political battles with which feminism is usually associated. That is precisely why they matter. Inequality survives not only through laws and institutions, but also through thousands of apparently inconsequential encounters that quietly establish whose intelligence will be recognized, whose boundaries will be respected and who is still expected to remain smaller in order to keep the social atmosphere pleasant and the corporate culture intact.

Steinem understood that what appeared personal was often evidence of something larger. That recognition became one of the most consequential ideas of the women’s movement because it gave women a language for experiences they had been encouraged to interpret as individual inadequacies. Economic dependence could be described as a private marital arrangement. Exhaustion could be blamed on a woman’s inability to manage her obligations gracefully. Sexual harassment could be treated as flattery misunderstood by the humourless. The unequal division of domestic and emotional labour could disappear beneath the reassuring language of love, temperament and tradition. Even distress produced by lives over which women exercised remarkably little control could be returned to them as a problem of adjustment. Once these experiences were spoken aloud and compared, however, their repetition became difficult to ignore. What had looked like a collection of personal failures began to reveal a social design.

That recognition has profound implications for how we speak about health. Self-health is often introduced through personal habits: what we eat, how we move, whether we sleep sufficiently, how effectively we manage stress and how carefully we respond to the body’s changing needs. These choices matter enormously, but they do not occur in a political or social vacuum. Before a person can participate meaningfully in her own health, she needs some authority over the life in which that health must be sustained. She needs safety, credible information, economic possibilities and the freedom to make decisions about her body. She needs time that is not entirely claimed by the care of others and a reasonable expectation that her account of her own experience will be taken seriously. Personal agency cannot eliminate every structural obstacle, nor should the language of personal responsibility be used to conceal the conditions that make health far more difficult for some people to protect than for others. There are circumstances in which greater knowledge can change a life, and there are circumstances in which the environment itself must change.

Acknowledging these conditions does not diminish the value of personal health practices; it clarifies what they can reasonably be expected to accomplish. Nutritious food, movement, rest and methods of regulating stress can strengthen the body’s capacity to meet the demands of life, but they cannot provide financial security, make an unsafe home safe, redistribute an unequal burden of care or correct the institutional dismissal of a woman’s experience. Their purpose should be to support her health and enlarge her capacity to act, not to help her tolerate indefinitely the conditions undermining both. When wellness is reduced to improving the individual’s ability to adapt, it can quietly transfer responsibility for harmful circumstances onto the person living within them. Steinem’s work offers an essential corrective: agency involves caring for oneself, but it also includes recognizing when the burden being managed does not originate within the individual and should not remain hers alone to carry.

Perhaps this is why her death feels more consequential than the loss of a celebrated figure from another era. We are not simply looking back at a completed struggle or paying tribute to a woman whose work has safely entered history. We are being asked to remember how recently many ordinary freedoms were neither ordinary nor secure, how fiercely their recognition was resisted and how quickly rights can become vulnerable once the generations who fought for them are no longer here to describe what existed before. The danger is not that younger women have failed to memorize the names of feminist leaders. Every generation inherits achievements whose origins it only partly understands. The danger begins when inheritance is mistaken for nature—when rights acquired through persistent human effort come to seem like permanent features of the landscape, incapable of erosion because we cannot remember a world in which they were absent.

Gloria Steinem leaves behind more than an account of what women overcame. She leaves a question for women and men alike: what will we do with freedoms we did not have to win ourselves? We can enjoy them without examining their history, reduce feminism to an obsolete quarrel between the sexes or assume that progress, once achieved, continues under its own momentum. Or we can recognize that equality is not an artifact handed intact from one generation to the next. It is a way of arranging human life that must be understood, renewed and defended in the places where it is most visible and in the ordinary moments when almost no one appears to be watching.

The world into which Steinem was born in 1934 had made remarkably elaborate arrangements for limiting women while describing those limitations as protection. A woman’s dependence could be idealized as femininity, her unpaid labour recast as devotion and her exclusion from authority explained as evidence that she was too valuable in the home to be burdened by public life. The language was often flattering, which made the restrictions easier to preserve. Women were not necessarily told that they lacked intelligence or judgment; they were assured that their natural gifts belonged elsewhere. Even as more women entered universities and paid employment, the structure surrounding them continued to assume that marriage, motherhood and service to others would remain the organizing principles of their adult lives. Their employment could be treated as temporary, their wages as supplementary and their ambitions as negotiable. A woman who wanted more was not simply challenging a rule. She was challenging an entire account of what a good woman was supposed to want.

Canada was not exempt from that history. Canadian women’s legal, educational and economic circumstances did not develop identically to those in the United States, and it would be inaccurate to attribute changes here to one American figure. Yet the same broad assumptions crossed borders, as did the movement that challenged them. The Royal Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1967 after sustained pressure from women’s organizations, documented inequalities in education, employment, public life, taxation, family law and reproductive autonomy that had long been treated as separate or private concerns. Its 1970 report made 167 recommendations and helped give institutional form to questions women had already been raising among themselves: why their work was valued differently, why childcare was treated as a private inconvenience rather than a social necessity, why their representation in government remained so limited and why decisions determining the shape of women’s lives were still made overwhelmingly without them. The Canadian and American movements had their own leaders, political circumstances and unfinished arguments, but they belonged to a much larger international recognition that women’s inequality was neither accidental nor inevitable.

Steinem entered that movement through journalism, but not through the sort of journalism the women’s pages of the period generally invited her to practise. Her 1963 investigation of working conditions at the Playboy Club, for which she worked undercover as a “Bunny,” brought her considerable attention, although not always the professional respect that might have followed an exposé on a subject considered more serious because men dominated it. The assignment revealed more than the sexualized expectations imposed on the women employed there; it also demonstrated how readily the culture could consume a woman’s appearance while discounting the intelligence observing it. Steinem would spend much of her career negotiating that contradiction. Her beauty made her highly visible, then became a reason for some people to doubt her substance. She was expected to represent feminism attractively enough to remain acceptable, but any attention paid to her attractiveness could then be used to diminish the work she was doing. It was a particularly efficient trap, and one that has hardly vanished. Women in public life are still required to be visually legible in ways men rarely are, then accused of benefiting from the scrutiny to which they are subjected.

To describe Steinem merely as the public face of second-wave feminism is therefore both understandable and inadequate. A face can symbolize a movement, but it cannot explain what made the movement durable. Her deeper contribution lay in connecting journalism to organization: creating places in which women’s experiences could be reported seriously, building networks through which recognition could become action and helping bring people into political life who had rarely seen themselves reflected there. When Ms. appeared first as an insert in New York magazine in 1971 and then as an independent publication in 1972, its importance was not simply that a magazine had been created for women. Magazines for women already existed in abundance. The difference was that Ms. addressed women as people living in the world rather than as consumers preoccupied with becoming more pleasing within it. It examined politics, work, family, sexuality, violence, race, reproductive freedom and the distribution of power without reducing women’s interests to appearance, domestic performance or advice on maintaining relationships. It treated their lives as material worthy of journalism.

That distinction may be difficult to appreciate now because it helped transform what readers expect to find in public discourse. Subjects once dismissed as too intimate, indecorous or insignificant to merit serious examination became recognizable as questions of health, law, labour and citizenship. Domestic violence was not merely an unhappy marriage. Sexual harassment was not a private misunderstanding. Reproductive freedom was not an embarrassing matter to be settled quietly between authorities while women lived with the consequences. Childcare was not evidence of a mother’s personal failure to reconcile incompatible demands. The vocabulary available today is so familiar that it can obscure how radical it once was to name these experiences accurately and place them beside other matters of public importance. Language did not solve the underlying problems, but it changed what could be perceived, shared and contested. People cannot easily organize around an experience they have been taught to regard as theirs alone.

Steinem’s prominence also encouraged a convenient historical simplification: that the women’s movement was created by a small circle of educated white women who discovered inequality and taught everyone else how to resist it. In reality, the movement drew upon generations of organizing by Black and Indigenous women, lesbians, labour activists and women involved in civil rights and anti-poverty struggles, many of whom had long understood that gender could not be separated from race, class, sexuality or political power. Steinem acknowledged these influences and built much of her work through coalition, even as the institutions and leaders of the period remained shaped by the limits and unresolved tensions of their time. Her legacy is substantial enough to be considered in full: not polished into the story of a solitary icon, but understood as part of a diverse, sometimes divided and continually evolving movement whose progress depended as much on internal challenges as collective purpose.

The temptation to judge an earlier movement solely by the language and understanding available to us now is nevertheless its own kind of historical vanity. It allows the present to imagine itself morally complete while benefiting from work that was necessarily undertaken before every question had been resolved. Social movements are not born fully enlightened. They learn through disagreement, correction, exclusion, coalition, failure and the persistent intervention of people whose lives expose the limits of the prevailing analysis. Steinem’s legacy matters not because she delivered a finished theory of liberation, but because she helped create conditions in which women could enter the argument, challenge one another and continue enlarging its scope. Equality was not presented as sameness, nor feminism as the advancement of a narrow category of women already closest to power. At its most serious, the project asked how human difference could exist without being organized into human rank.

Men were implicated in that question from the beginning, although not always in the manner they preferred. It was easier for a man to declare himself sympathetic to women’s equality than to examine what equality might change in his own home, career or understanding of himself. Public endorsement could coexist comfortably with a wife carrying most of the domestic labour, a female colleague being interrupted or underpaid, and daughters raised with freedoms whose practical limits became apparent as soon as they inconvenienced a man. The distinction persists. Many men genuinely believe in equality, yet belief costs very little when it remains abstract. Its substance appears when credit, authority, money, time and opportunity must be shared; when a woman’s interpretation of her experience conflicts with his; when her boundary frustrates him; or when challenging another man would be less comfortable than remaining silent.

True allyship is revealed in those moments precisely because it is not a performance directed toward women. A man does not become an ally by repeatedly identifying himself as one, nor by treating women with chivalry that leaves the underlying hierarchy intact. He becomes trustworthy by how he behaves when no gratitude is available to him: whether he attributes an idea to the woman who offered it, accepts correction without retaliation, shares the unnoticed work, challenges contemptuous talk in male company and recognizes women’s professional authority without converting the encounter into an opportunity for personal attention. He understands that a woman who appears in a professional space has not invited an appraisal of her attractiveness, and that calling such an appraisal a compliment does not entitle him to have it received as one. Respect is not measured by the speaker’s preferred interpretation of his behaviour, but by his willingness to recognize the other person’s stated boundaries.

The point is not that women are occasionally complimented at inappropriate moments. It is that appearance still functions as the first measure of female value, while intelligence, judgment and professional authority are considered afterward—if they are considered at all. A woman may arrive with decades of education and experience and still find that the role imagined for her is to look attractive, remain agreeable and help create an atmosphere in which men conduct the consequential conversation. I experienced this repeatedly when I was asked to “volunteer” at golf tournaments where what was actually wanted was decorative female presence, or to attend professional functions less as a colleague than as part of the entertainment. The language has become more polished, but the assignment remains familiar: be accomplished enough to belong in the room, attractive enough to enhance it and quiet enough not to alter its balance of power.

What has changed is the way this arrangement is presented to younger women. Expectations once imposed openly are now frequently repackaged as personal choice, confidence or empowerment, making compliance appear self-directed even when the rewards and penalties remain unmistakable. A woman is free to emphasize her appearance, but that freedom exists within a culture that continues to reward her for being desirable, agreeable and undemanding while imposing different consequences when she claims authority without making it attractive or comfortable. Choice matters, but describing every choice as liberation prevents us from asking what shaped it, who benefits from it and whether women have genuinely become freer—or have simply been taught to participate more enthusiastically in their own evaluation.

A secure sense of self leaves room for the dignity, competence and freedom of others. A capable woman need not be experienced as an accusation, her independence as rejection or equality as a transfer of status from one person to another. Equality expands the possibilities available to everyone by loosening gender roles that have organized human relationships around dominance and submission: assigning women the work of accommodation and care while equating men’s worth with earning power, emotional restraint and authority. These expectations have imposed different consequences, with women bearing the greater legal, economic and physical restrictions, but neither women nor men have emerged untouched by them. Building something better asks all of us to examine what we inherited, recognize the roles we may still be performing and create relationships in which strength does not require someone else to become smaller.

This is one reason Steinem’s work continues to matter beyond the political campaigns with which she is most readily associated. She challenged not only the distribution of formal rights, but the intimate beliefs through which inequality reproduces itself. Law can prohibit discrimination without preventing women from being underestimated. A workplace can adopt policies on equality while continuing to reward the person least burdened by care. A household can describe itself as modern, while one partner remains responsible for noticing everything required to keep it functioning. A health system can formally recognize a woman’s right to care while repeatedly questioning the accuracy of what she reports about her own body. Institutional progress matters profoundly, but culture lives in habits, expectations and reflexes that legislation alone cannot reach.

Those reflexes enter the body. The relationship between social conditions and health is not a metaphor, and it does not require us to claim that every illness can be traced to inequality. A nervous system repeatedly required to anticipate threats does not become less affected because the threat is socially normalized. Chronic responsibility does not cease to be physiologically demanding because the labour involved is unpaid or performed out of love. Financial dependence, unsafe housing, harassment, caregiving overload and the persistent experience of not being believed can shape sleep, stress, access to food, opportunities for movement, exposure to violence and the ability to seek care. Women’s health cannot be fully understood by examining female biology while treating the lives in which that biology operates as background scenery.

The larger conditions of a woman’s life inevitably shape what she can do to protect her health. Adequate sleep, nutritious food, movement, boundaries and nervous system regulation are valuable, but each requires some combination of time, money, safety and control over daily life. A woman carrying most of the caregiving, domestic and emotional labour in her household cannot recover simply by being given better instructions for self-care. Neither can someone regulate her way out of financial insecurity, workplace discrimination or an unsafe home. Personal practices can strengthen her capacity to respond, but lasting health also depends on reducing the demands that repeatedly overwhelm that capacity. Otherwise, self-care becomes one more responsibility added to an already unreasonable load.

Self-health should offer something better than that. It should increase a person’s capacity to understand her body, make informed decisions and act on what she learns, while remaining honest about the forces no private routine can correct. It should never become a polished language for abandoning people to conditions they did not create. Personal agency and collective responsibility are not competing ideas. We need both because knowledge is most useful when people possess the freedom and resources to act upon it, while social change becomes meaningful only when it enlarges the actual lives of individuals. Steinem’s feminism joined those levels of experience. It began with women recognizing themselves as authorities in their own lives and extended outward toward the institutions that had denied them the means to exercise that authority.

The freedoms created by that work can easily obscure the conditions that made it necessary. A young woman entering university, choosing a profession, controlling her income or deciding that marriage and motherhood are possibilities rather than obligations may encounter obstacles, but she is unlikely to experience those choices as permissions recently wrested from an unwilling culture. Nor should she have to live in permanent gratitude to earlier generations. The purpose of social progress is to make freedom ordinary, not to require each person who benefits from it to perform a daily ceremony of remembrance. Yet there is a difference between living freely and assuming that freedom maintains itself. When history disappears, rights begin to look less like collective achievements than natural features of modern life. What appears natural need not be defended, and what is not defended can be steadily weakened, while those who depend upon it remain confident that the old world is too distant to return.

That confidence has never been justified. Progress does not move in a straight line, nor does one generation’s victory bind the next to honour it. Rights survive through laws, but also through institutions willing to enforce them, citizens capable of recognizing their erosion and cultures that continue to understand why they matter. Bodily autonomy can be restricted incrementally. Economic independence can be compromised by the cost of care, insecure work and policies built around households that no longer resemble the lives people actually lead. Women can be welcomed into positions of authority while being subjected to forms of hostility intended to make occupying them unbearable. Language can change, while power remains remarkably resourceful. Even equality itself can be emptied of meaning when it is treated as a belief everyone professes rather than a condition against which decisions and conduct must be measured.

Remembering Steinem should therefore involve more than admiring her endurance or circulating the most familiar lines from her speeches. It should renew our ability to recognize the work she was doing. She was not asking women to become invulnerable, nor promising that confidence alone could overcome institutions designed to exclude them. She helped women see that self-respect could become a basis for solidarity and that private authority over one’s life required public conditions capable of protecting it. She also understood that no movement worthy of the name could depend on a single leader. Cultural memory often prefers a recognizable face because a face is easier to commemorate than a coalition, but Steinem’s influence was exercised largely through connection: bringing people together, amplifying work already underway and using visibility to create room for voices the public had been trained not to hear.

Perhaps that is the inheritance most worth preserving. We do not honour the women who changed the world by turning them into exceptional figures whose courage separates them from ordinary people. We honour them by understanding that history moved because ordinary people recognized one another, compared what they had been told to endure privately and decided that the arrangement was neither natural nor acceptable. Some wrote, some organized, some marched, some challenged discriminatory laws and some altered the balance of power inside a single household. Some men listened, reconsidered what they had inherited and chose to become genuine partners in the work. None acted with perfect knowledge, and none could know precisely what later generations would do with the ground they gained.

What we do with it is now our responsibility. For women, that cannot mean proving ourselves endlessly worthy of rights that are already ours or accepting a new obligation to excel at every freedom previous generations made possible. Agency includes the right to ambition, but also the right to an ordinary life directed from within. For men, it means understanding that equality is neither an accusation nor a favour they are asked to extend. It is a practice of relinquishing the assumption that their comfort, judgment or recognition should establish the limits of a woman’s life. For institutions, it means resisting the convenience of celebrating women’s resilience while leaving intact the conditions that continually require it.

And for those of us concerned with health, it means refusing to separate the body from the freedom of the person inhabiting it. We can teach nutrition, movement, recovery and greater attentiveness to the body without pretending that everyone begins with equal safety, time, money or authority. We can encourage people to take an active role in their health while recognizing that they cannot correct every failure of the systems around them. We can help them become better able to care for themselves while also questioning the conditions that make ordinary health, safety and stability so difficult to maintain. Self-health begins with knowledge, but knowledge alone is not agency. Agency exists when a person is recognized as the rightful author of her life and possesses a meaningful ability to act upon what she knows.

Gloria Steinem could not have completed this work because equality is never secured by one person, one movement or one generation. Her legacy is not a finished world handed down to us, nor a reassuring story in which women once lacked equality until a heroic few obtained it. She helped give us language for recognizing power, institutions through which to challenge it and a wider understanding of what women’s lives could contain, while demonstrating that arrangements presented as permanent can be changed when enough people stop mistaking familiarity for inevitability. Her death closes an extraordinary life, but leaves women and men with the same decision: whether equality will remain a principle we admire or become visible in the way we live, work, listen, share authority and recognize every person’s right to define and direct her own life.

What we inherited was never the certainty that the work had been completed, but the knowledge that arrangements once presented as natural and permanent could be challenged, rewritten and ultimately replaced. Steinem’s generation did more than secure particular freedoms; it expanded what women and men were able to imagine about authority, work, family, health and the ownership of a human life. Forgetting Gloria Steinem would therefore mean more than allowing the name of a famous woman to recede from public memory. It would mean forgetting that much of what now appears ordinary first had to be conceived in defiance of the world as it was, articulated before it was widely accepted and defended long before it became familiar. Her legacy asks us to recognize the life that work made possible, to notice where its promises remain unfulfilled and to resist the comforting assumption that progress will preserve itself. Every generation inherits both the ground gained by those before it and the unfinished responsibility of deciding what must come next. Ours is no exception.