In her final essay for The New Yorker, legendary feminist and organizer Gloria Steinem reflects on a lifetime of activism, tracing her journey from writer to itinerant organizer. She credits her time in India for opening her eyes to racial diversity and the global nature of inequality. Steinem defines feminism as the equality of all people, critiquing the “built-in advantage” of hierarchy, and highlights the persistent global disparities in income, land ownership, and violence that prove the movement is still needed. This is a powerful and succinct capstone to her life’s work.
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Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay
“I always say I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to talk. But, once I started writing about my own personal experiences, I was surprised to receive invitations to speak on campuses or to women’s groups. I knew it was important to do, so I started travelling regularly with speaking partners in America and other countries to help spread the word of a global women’s movement.
Eventually, after covering lots of territory and many issues, I realized I had become an itinerant organizer. It’s an unlikely profession, but really it is quite simple. Organizers observe the world, see what it could be, and help make it real. As I look back on my own life, I see those experiences that set me on my own course.
I learned about feminism greatly from living in India for a couple of years after I had graduated from college in the nineteen-fifties. My time in that newly independent nation made me realize that most of the world did not live as we did in the United States. I realized there was a terrible monochromatic quality to the people in my life, and that white people were a small minority in the world. In India, I got accustomed to, and began to value, racial diversity.
The people I met in India who were social activists were almost all Gandhians. I worked with them, went to school with them, and walked through villages with them. I found I was very drawn to them as human beings because they were kind, open, nonviolent, and not nationalistic at all. I think culturally women are drawn to nonviolence. Probably because we are the major victims of violence, we become the major movers of peace.
Only later in my life did I realize how much those years had influenced what I now see as my feminism. But maybe we should not call it “feminism.” Others have preferred “womanist” or “mujerista” or “women’s liberationist.” Whatever the name, words that stand for equality are demonized by those who benefit from inequality.
Opposition will always come from people whose power rests on the group they were born into—whether that is sex, race, class, or ethnicity—rather than on what they do as individuals. This persists because they believe in hierarchy and they fear what might happen if they have no built-in advantage. And this is sad because they may never find out who they really are, and what they would really want to do in life.
For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule.
Maybe we should call it egalitarianism, or even humanism. The problem with humanism is that it is often interpreted as being anti-religion, so I don’t think it’s inclusive enough. Regardless of what we call it, it just means treating each of us as uniquely human. The experiences of race and gender and class are very real and important, but they are also constructed and changeable. Our humanity is consistent and sacred.
Still, for some, it remains a mystery why women need a movement to distinguish our efforts toward equality. For me, it seems quite obvious. For starters, females do the majority of work in the world when you account for paid and unpaid labor, yet only receive about a third of total labor income globally, and own less than twenty per cent of land worldwide. Females are also far more likely than males to be illiterate, go hungry, be victims of human trafficking, or be murdered by a family member. And, unlike most of its democratic counterparts, the United States has never had a female head of state.
As I write this, the world seems in a tailspin. Many feel that all the progress we’ve made is being reversed. When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.
In my own life, women were invisibilized, in public and even by language itself. I remember times when thoughtful male journalists would look at a roomful of women and report, “There’s no one here.” Or, when I and other women had an idea, the only way we could express it was by having the man next to us state it.
People often ask me: What should we do? No one person could answer that for everyone. I will say that we must work together to make sure that equal laws and customs become normalized. While there are many external gestures, the biggest leaps are those that we make within ourselves. Standing up for your own full humanity is an example you can give to others. Bring equality into your workplace and home—and follow the sense you probably had as a child, before gender roles took shape, about fairness.
We have seen leaps of progress already, thanks to the millions of women and girls—and many men and boys, too—who have stood up for equality. Because of this movement, most people in the world have now seen women who are astronauts, union organizers and farmers, liberators and peacemakers. Thanks to women who gathered to tell the truth at the kitchen table or village well, who acted in local elections or at the United Nations, feminism—or any other word for human equality—is widely recognized as a precondition of democracy, economic development, spirituality, and peace.
So treat every woman as a full human being, an equal human being, whether that means encouraging your mother to do what she’s always dreamed of doing, or not expecting your girlfriend to cook you dinner. Only with actions from each of us will we see equality as a true fact of life. ♦
Conclusion
Gloria Steinem’s final essay is far more than a nostalgic look back at a remarkable life; it is a clarion call for the present and a blueprint for the future.
In tracing her journey from a writer hesitant to speak to an “itinerant organizer” crisscrossing the globe, she distills a lifetime of activism into a simple, profound truth: equality is not a given but a constant struggle requiring dedicated effort. Her reflections on India reveal a pivotal moment of awakening, not just to global inequality, but to the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class, a perspective that would define her life’s work.
Steinem’s most enduring gift in this essay may be her insistence on clarity. She cuts through the noise to remind us that feminism, at its core, is simply the belief in the full humanity and equality of all people. She doesn’t shy away from the reality of opposition, pinpointing its root in the fear of those who benefit from hierarchy. Yet, she offers a note of compassion for them, suggesting that this fear prevents them from discovering their own true potential.
Crucially, she leaves us with the “why.” By starkly outlining the global disparities in income, land ownership, and violence against women, she proves that the movement she helped build is not a relic of the past but a necessity for the present. Her essay is a poignant reminder that progress is not linear, and that the work of organizing, of seeing the world as it could be, is never finished. It is a final, powerful message from a pioneering voice, urging us not just to remember how far we have come, but to recommit to the distance we still must travel.
Gloria Steinem Quotes
On being judged by her looks, even as a feminist
“Nobody ever called me beautiful until I was publicly a feminist, and that was in my mid-30s. It was clear that label was being assigned to me. The most hurtful part is that you work very hard, and people say it’s because of your looks.” (August 2011)
On concrete changes she saw in her fight for feminism
“We know sexism is not inevitable. It’s only about controlling reproduction and therefore controlling women. If we have reproductive freedom, that is the ability to decide for ourselves when and whether to have children and what happens to our bodies, it can be reversed.” (May 2016)
On America’s lack of a female president
“We live in a democracy that’s one of the few in the world that’s never had a female elected leader. That’s kind of ridiculous. I mean, we’re choosing from half the country’s talent” (March 2026)
On supporting abortion rights
“It’s obviously ridiculous to say somebody is ‘pro-abortion.’ Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I think I’ll have an abortion. It’s a pleasurable experience.’ The question is not pro-abortion or anti-abortion, the question is who makes the decision: a woman and her physician, or the government.” (May 2017)
On the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade
“Obviously, without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” (June 2022)
“Women have always taken power over our own bodies, and we will keep right on. An unjust court can’t stop abortion, but it guarantees civil disobedience and disrespect for the court.” (June 2022)
On being called the B-word
“It took me years to learn what to do when someone calls you a bitch. Just smile in a calm triumphant way, and say, ‘Thank you!’” (July 2020)
On deciding to marry at age 66
“I hadn’t changed — marriage had changed.” (August 2011)
On whether she regretted not having children
“No, not for a millisecond.” (August 2011)
On the early years of the women’s rights movement
“When people were saying, ‘You’re all bra-burners and all that,’ we had to work very hard to be taken seriously. We were still having to prove that women were being discriminated against.” (August 1987)
On the success of Ms. Magazine, which Steinem co-founded in 1972
“It’s the result of letting women tell the truth to each other and not pretending that we’re all white, skinny, beautiful, that we’re only interested in 101 different ways to cook hamburger, being superwoman or whatever.” (August 1987)
On taking advocacy on the road to campuses, marches and rallies
“You can’t do it on the phone or on the web. You have to be there with all five senses. It should be obvious that people can’t empathize with each other unless we’re in the same room.” (October 2015)
On going undercover as a Playboy bunny for a 1963 magazine exposé
“I could not have made a bigger mistake. It was personally and professionally a disaster. In the short term it was much harder to get serious assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.”
On inspiring others to embrace activism
“I want people to realize that if a very imperfect person did this, maybe they can, too!” (August 2011)
On wanting to debunk her rich girl image in 1970
“Say that I have always worked for a living, my own living, that I buy my dresses off the rack. I have never been to Acapulco and I don’t go away for ski weekends.” (April 1970)
On how her education didn’t include normal schooling until 6th grade
“In the wintertime, my father always put the whole family in a house trailer and we were working our way, buying and selling antiques and so on, to Florida or California. I think my family thought because I was always reading books in the back seat, that was enough.” (March 2026)
On her work as a writer
“I know I’m doing the right thing by writing, because it’s the only thing I do that doesn’t make me feel guilty.” (April 1970)
“If you’re a writer and you really care about writing, you put it off. You wax the floor.” (October 2015)
