She taught generations of women that our stories matter, our bodies are our own, and hope is a form of planning.

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from a special episode of On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, “Rest in Power Gloria Steinem—An Enduring Legacy of Truth-Telling, Torch-Bearing and Bringing Joy to the Resistance.”

This week, Gloria Steinem died at the age of 92, peacefully at her home in New York City and surrounded by people who loved her.

We will miss her at Ms. I will miss her personally.

Gloria has been part of what I see as my own journey—a journey that includes Ms., but began long before we created Ms. Studios and before I joined the magazine.

As I have written in The New York Times, I left home at 15 with $10 in my pocket and a plane ticket to New York. My childhood held deep privilege, but also incredible pain.

There were parts of Gloria’s childhood that mirrored my own.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, she spent her early years crisscrossing the country with her parents and sister. She described it as living in a caravan as her father worked as a traveling salesman. But he left the family when she was 10, leaving Gloria to care for her mother, who had long suffered from mental illness and terrifying hallucinations. For a period of time, Gloria did not attend school because she was tending to her mother.

She later said that she chose not to have children because she had already had a mother to take care of.

We do not talk enough about stories like that: the sensitivity that came from her own childhood. There are aspects of it that mirrored and matched mine.

Pronatalism in the United States still insists that all women should want children, care for those children, stay home and find satisfaction within the narrow boundaries others have drawn for them. Even education has historically been framed not as a path toward women’s intellectual or economic freedom, but as a place to find a husband.

To want something more—and to care about something larger than the life prescribed for you—has always carried challenging consequences for women. Gloria understood that deeply. She also understood that the freedom to shape one’s life begins with the ability to govern one’s own body.

A Woman’s Right to Choose Her Life

Ms. was pathbreaking.

In the pages of Ms., before there was Roe v. Wade, Gloria Steinem, Billie Jean King and others spoke and wrote about having abortions. This was when abortion was still criminalized throughout much of the United States. In most states, a woman had to demonstrate that continuing a pregnancy would endanger her life. Some states allowed exceptions to protect her physical or mental health, or in cases of rape, incest or severe fetal anomaly. Even then, obtaining approval could require examinations by multiple doctors, a psychiatrist or a hospital committee.

What Gloria knew—and what was clear across the country—was that girls and women were dying from illegal and back-alley abortions.

At 22, Gloria became pregnant while engaged. She ended the engagement and traveled to London, where abortion was still illegal, to terminate the pregnancy before continuing on to India.

In her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road—I am so grateful to have a signed copy—she dedicated the book to Dr. John Sharpe, the physician who helped her. He asked her to promise two things: that she would not reveal his name and that she would do what she wanted with her life.

“Dear Dr. Sharpe,” she wrote to him decades later, “I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.”

It is difficult to imagine a more powerful tribute—or a clearer expression of what reproductive freedom makes possible.

Gloria knew that her experience, dangerous and stigmatized as it was, had been safer than what countless other women endured. Before Roe v. Wade, girls and women died from illegal abortions. Parents found daughters who had bled to death after desperately trying to end pregnancies themselves. Husbands found wives dead on dining room tables. Hospital wards filled with women suffering from hemorrhage and sepsis after botched procedures.

Gloria refused to look away.

In 1972, as New York lawmakers threatened to roll back the state’s abortion law, she joined other organizers in declaring that women would “stand together in defense of a woman’s right to abortion.” They would continue, she said, “until every woman has the right to decide for herself whether or not, and when, to have an abortion.”

That clarity—that reproductive autonomy is indispensable to equal citizenship—guided her throughout her life. It informed her work for access to contraception, abortion rights and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. It also speaks urgently to our post-Dobbs reality, as rights Gloria spent decades helping to secure are dismantled and women are once again denied the authority to make the most intimate decisions about their lives.

The Power of Narration

After graduating from Smith College, Gloria spent two years in India as part of the Chester Bowles fellowship. Her time there truly helped to shape so much of the nuance behind what she understood in terms of class, race, sex and sex equality—and what inequality meant along all of those paradigms.

During those two years, she worked with incredibly vulnerable women across a variety of roles. She spent time in villages with women and helped organize nonviolent protests against government policies. Much of this sparked her interest in grassroots activism.

And then she did something incredibly important—something that ultimately leads to us at Ms. magazine: She became a journalist.

She understood the power of narration and journalism. She understood what is captured in an African adage: The tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter until the lioness has her say. The only way for women to begin to have their say was for women to put pen to paper.

Imagine, in the 1960s and ’70s, that over the course of centuries, women’s stories had not been told by women—or that the stories women did tell were shuttered to the side. The voices given priority on nightly news and in newspapers and magazines were not the voices of women, even though the issues being discussed profoundly affected women’s lives.

What Gloria Steinem became was a translator, a truth-teller, a person who—like Shirley Chisholm—was unbought and unbossed in telling stories.

She began writing freelance pieces in the 1960s. Living in New York, her first major published article appeared in Esquire in 1962. It was about birth control and how college students’ views on sex were changing.

Keep in mind that at the time, there were states that banned even married people from accessing contraception. That may be hard to imagine—except that now we are living in a post-Dobbs reality, where so much that Gloria fought for and worked so hard for is being dismantled, or already has been dismantled.

From writing about contraception, she joined together with Dorothy Pitman Hughes. You remember their famous photograph: Gloria and Dorothy, fists raised in the air, representing women’s power and the importance of women’s power.

It would not be long before Gloria helped found Ms. magazine.

Unlike any national mainstream magazine before it, Ms. treated women’s social, economic and political perspectives as worthy of serious journalism. It spoke directly to women’s concerns. It reported on the discrimination they experienced at home, at work, in schools, in hospitals, in politics and under the law.

It took women seriously—and women were hungry for it.

The preview issue sold out in eight days. Bags of letters arrived at the magazine’s offices. Readers wrote about leaving violent marriages, going back to school, seeking work, raising children, running for office and discovering that experiences they had been taught to understand as private failures were in fact shared political realities.

As Gloria later wrote, the common message was: “At last, I know I’m not alone.”

This was the revolution she helped light. She did not merely change which stories appeared in magazines; she changed who was recognized as a credible narrator of her own life. She helped women see themselves not as isolated individuals navigating private hardships, but as people whose shared experiences could become a source of knowledge, solidarity and power.

But what first caught the attention of so many in journalism—and she would later say that if people were mad at her, they would refer to her as a Playboy bunny—was her undercover story about the Playboy Club. In 1963, writing for Show magazine, Gloria went undercover as a bunny at the Manhattan Playboy Club. She detailed the seedy and sexist reality behind Hugh Hefner’s empire.

In 1968, she became a founding editor and writer at New York magazine, where she continued to tell important stories. She wrote about how, after Black Power, women’s liberation would be essential.

This writing was critical—this was the period leading up to Roe v. Wade. Women and girls were desperate. Women had experienced rape. Girls had experienced incest. Women were on the brink of going to college or were already in college, knowing that they would not be able to stay while pregnant or parenting a child. And parents were coming home and finding their daughters dead in bathtubs full of blood because they were so desperate that they tried to self-administer an abortion with a coat hanger. Husbands were coming home and finding their wives dead on dining room tables. Women found in motel rooms, bleeding out on stacks of newspapers and sheets. Hospital wards filled not with women who had just had babies, but with women experiencing sepsis and nearing death after botched, back-alley abortions.

There was a strange irony in these times. While women were bleeding out and dying after illegal abortions, the U.S. military required pregnant women in the military to leave the service.

In 1970, Capt. Susan Struck wanted to continue both her pregnancy and her military career, but the Air Force forced her to choose between having an abortion and being discharged.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then an attorney with the ACLU, represented Struck. She understood that the case was not only about abortion. It was about someone else controlling a woman and her reproductive life.

Gloria Steinem began calling for the reproductive freedom of all women and girls, seeing that freedom as essential to full and equal citizenship and participation in society. That is why, up until the day she died—quite literally—she was fighting for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and saw it as critically important.

And let’s be clear: The path to Roe was not an easy one. She was involved in steady activism in that space—attending rallies, leading rallies and curating rallies.

She wrote and spoke about the pushback she received from men in journalism. They would tell her: “You are a great writer. You have so much potential. You are a terrific editor. But you should stop with this other stuff—this women stuff, this feminism stuff—because you have great potential, and that’s going to weigh you down.”

That was not Gloria’s philosophy at all. Her agenda was simple: the equality of all persons.

President Barack Obama captured this gift when he awarded Gloria the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. He called her a “champion noticer”—someone alert to the large and small ways women are treated unfairly. Her work, he said, did more than change the opportunities available to women. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”

That may be one of the most profound legacies a journalist can leave.

Equality Has to Be for All

Gloria was of the perspective that the early feminists—the people who really made feminism come alive—were the Black women she learned from. She believed there was much our nation still had to learn from Black women.

She understood, particularly given her time in India, that the population of women who had suffered through the transatlantic slave trade—kidnapped from their homes, forced into sexual and physical labor, denied the very identity of a person or citizen and instead inscribed in American law as property—had survived the unimaginable.

The children they bore were not legally theirs, but were owned by the people who owned them and could be traded, sold, rented out or leased out.

She understood that those women, who survived that and then survived Jim Crow and Jane Crow, had a sense of what constitutionalism really meant. They had a sense of what democracy really meant. Of what it would take to make things right. Of what it means to persevere against all odds, yet lead a Civil Rights Movement that would not be exclusionary—that would not say, “This is just for us. This is just about Black women and their children.”

She was moved by Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when Hamer talked about the struggle of Black women in Mississippi, including herself.

Hamer had been traveling home from a voter-education workshop when she and other activists were arrested after stopping at a segregated bus station in Winona, Miss. In jail, white law-enforcement officers ordered two Black prisoners to beat her. She sustained permanent injuries.

Gloria said this moment in history had a profound impact on her.

Gloria understood that kind of persistence. She also understood that movements advance when people working in different lanes carry the same principles forward. Pauli Murray supplied an intellectual and legal blueprint that helped shape Brown v. Board of Education and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s campaign against sex-discriminatory laws. Ginsburg took that fight into the courts. Gloria helped carry it into public consciousness—socializing the argument, shaping the narrative and giving people language for inequalities they had been told not to see.

There’s Enough Torches for Everyone

Many have been reflecting on what she said about holding the torch, and that it made her angry for people to say, “Well, you’re going to put that torch down.”

Instead, her perspective was: You light other torches.

That is what you do with your torch. You do not give up, and you do not give in. You continue the work.

This was not a romantic metaphor. It was a theory of organizing: Movements endure when their knowledge, courage and power multiply. No single leader owns the work, and no generation completes it. We illuminate the path for one another.

After the House approved the ERA in 1970 but the Senate failed to follow, Gloria helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus with fellow feminist leaders and more than 300 women from across the United States. The group worked to include women in all aspects of political life. Its founders included Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Congress ultimately approved the ERA in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification. Gloria continued fighting for its recognition for the rest of her life.

Gloria Also Believed in Joy

When I reflect back on the 50th anniversary of Ms. book tour in 2023 with Gloria, and all the times before, something struck me: how many people would come up and say their mother was born in another country, and that she kept Ms. in the house. Whether we were at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum in Southern California or other parts of the country, it was clear Steinem’s reach extended throughout and beyond the United States.

She gave women around the world this sense of power, this sense that their voices mattered, that they could make a difference not only in their own lives but in the lives of others.

That it was their life—their choice to be educated, to work in whatever profession they chose and to govern their own bodies and reproductive health.

Gloria also believed in joy.

There is an image of the two of us together at a 50 Years of Ms. book event, and she has me cracking up. I do not remember what joke she told or what the statement was, but she is smiling, and I am truly in laughter with her. I have a number of photographs with Gloria from times we were together, but that one really touches my heart—especially now, at a time in which so many people feel defeated and so many people feel worried.

It reminds me that resistance is not sustained by outrage alone. There must also be laughter, community and what Gloria called “companions in hope.”

Roe has been overturned by our Supreme Court. New rules threaten to burden and suppress the voting rights of people across the United States. The Supreme Court has again severely weakened the Voting Rights Act. Executive orders and other government actions seek to roll back what had been matters of progress in women’s lives.

It would be easy to feel defeated. Gloria would tell us not to confuse fear with surrender.

The attacks on the academy, the attacks on law firms, the attacks on civil-society organizations, the direct attacks on civil rights—with all of that, it can be hard to think about the importance of making a joyful noise.

It can be hard to think about the importance of keeping a torch lit; the importance of holding on and persevering with that torch in order to light other torches.

It can be hard to see that the flame is still burning.

But it is.

It would do a disservice to Gloria Steinem’s legacy—and to those she fought with, worked with and worked toward a better day with—to forget that.

The torch is still burning. The light is still there.

Hope, for Gloria, was never passive optimism. “Hope is a form of planning,” she said. “If you don’t imagine what could be, you’re already defeated. We need companions in hope because we are social animals. But hope is practical and necessary.”

In 2017, standing before the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., Gloria called for “a deep democracy” in which people would refuse to be quiet or controlled. “We are at one with each other,” she said. “We are looking at each other, not up. No more asking Daddy.”

She reminded the crowd that the Constitution does not begin with “I, the president.” It begins with “We the People.”

Those words carry a special weight today. Democracy has never been a gift delivered from above. Equality has never arrived because people in power suddenly found it convenient. Both are built by people who recognize one another, tell the truth about their lives and refuse to accept that injustice is inevitable.

At her 90th birthday, Gloria said she hoped her legacy would help individual people become more of the unique, valuable, loved and lovable people they wanted to be.

That legacy belongs not only to Gloria, but to everyone who chooses to carry it forward.

The torch is still burning. The light is still there. Our task is not simply to preserve it. Our task is to use it—to light other torches, to tell the stories that power would prefer remain hidden, and to keep moving toward the more equal and representative world Gloria spent her life imagining.

We will, in fact, get there.

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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. Add your voice and complete the sentence: “Access to reproductive choices gave me the freedom to….” Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible. 

Look to these trusted groups if you or a loved one needs to know more about reliable abortion care:

• A one-stop-shop for abortion seekers: I Need An A
• Other websites to explore all your options for abortion care: Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder
• Safe websites to buy abortion medication: Aid Access, Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, Hey Jane
• If you need help affording abortion care, tell your telemedicine provider or contact an abortion fund near you.
• To protect your digital privacy when planning your abortion, click here.
• For free legal help as a patient or doctor, call If/When/How’s Repro Helpline—844-868-2812—or contact Pregnancy Justice.
• For medical advice, contact the Miscarriage & Abortion Hotline: 833-246-2632.
• If you need to know the abortion law in your state, look to the Center for Reproductive Rights. or Guttmacher Institute.