Gloria Steinem Gave It All

I remember noticing Gloria’s hands the first time we met, the way her fingernails were carefully shaped and slightly long, a detail of herself she consistently attended to. There was a femininity and a fragility to them that I hadn’t picked up on in photographs. They were always like this when I saw her. Her hair was always in its bob. She was always in black, with a concha belt slung around her waist. That day, she sat in the middle of her low sofa, surrounded by papers and undrunk cups of liquid, looking thinner than she did when I last saw her.

Gloria and I had always talked about marriage and its symbolism—what the institution has meant for women, what we inherit from it, what might be reclaimed or reinvented. Halfway through our conversation, I showed Gloria my own hands, and the ring on my left ring finger, which is meant to represent a different kind of union: a marriage to life itself. I found myself crouched on the floor in front of her, my bare knees on the carpet, explaining the concept, and I felt, very strongly, the sense of something having been passed and shared between us, and I was proud—proud to show her something I had made from ideas we had spent years turning over together.

Eventually, Gloria had to go upstairs for another appointment. Before she disappeared up the spiral staircase, I asked if I could hug her goodbye. As I pressed my body to hers, trying to wrap my arms around her carefully, I knew, with a peculiar certainty, that this would be the last time I saw her.

I have always felt a strange protectiveness toward Gloria, which is absurd when you consider that Gloria Steinem has spent her life protecting the rest of us. She is one of the greatest heroines of the twentieth century.

After the 2016 election, I cried, because I realized that Gloria might die without seeing a woman become President of the United States. There was something unbearable about watching her give almost the whole span of her adult life to democracy, to women, to the stubborn proposition that human beings might organize themselves more fairly, and still never see that particular threshold crossed. I also feared the coming assault on the rights that Gloria had worked so hard to protect.

I remember a male friend telling me that I was overreacting, and that it wasn’t going to be that big of a deal. I stared at the television and said, “They’ll go after Roe v. Wade.” The threat had been stated plainly for years; perhaps what was required was simply the willingness to believe people when they told you what they intended to do.

Gloria somehow held the urgency of it all without ever losing her lightness. When I first began getting to know her, I was anxious: Was I feminist enough, had I read enough, would I pass some imagined female purity test? Gloria gently dismantled the premise. People, she explained, are where they are in their journey of discovery and learning, and feminism had to meet them there. I didn’t have to arrive already knowing everything in order to belong.

Gloria was radical in the original sense of the word, which is derived from the Latin radix, meaning “root”—going to the system underneath the problem rather than attempting to remedy its surface effects—and she somehow held that radicalism alongside an almost unreasonable kindness. I have tried to carry that forward—to hold myself to account while understanding that patriarchy is not something women stand conveniently outside of. We were born inside it; it lives inside us. It has shaped our ideas of beauty, love, goodness, success, and safety, and we cannot simply announce ourselves liberated and be done with it. We can only begin to rectify something after we recognize it; we can only shed a skin once we have outgrown it.

Before leaving Gloria’s brownstone, I had given her a card I had bought in New York, made by the artist Olga Prinku, depicting a glittery silver snake. On the day of the eclipse, I look up what the snake means: transformation, rebirth, healing, knowledge—and feminine power. What a complicated creature we chose for this symbol. I think of the lion, that familiar emblem of masculine power, with his soft, beige fur and magnificent mane, made harmless enough in miniature that little boys sleep with him tucked under their arms. Women get the snake: close to the ground, frightening, blamed for the fall of man, and periodically required to split its own skin open in order to grow.