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I interviewed Gloria Steinem three times in my life. The first time, I was a teenager taking a high school women’s studies class. I don’t have my notes from that conversation. What I kept instead was the feeling: She took my call and talked to me like a colleague — not a kid with an assignment but a journalist with a question worth answering.
Every time I spoke with her or sat in a room where she was speaking, I came away changed. I know that sounds like hyperbole but it’s true.
Here are three of the lessons I took from her life and work.
First: What the media chooses to illuminate can change society.
That was the power of Ms. magazine. Ms. made news out of what women had been schooled to keep in the dark: abortion, sexual assault, discrimination, domestic violence, lesbian lives, even women’s anger and joy. Once those things were written, they were out of the shadows and into the open, where society had to look at them. A private pain, once made public, could awaken new understanding, inspire new possibilities, and reshape laws, institutions, culture and what people come to expect.
At that same time, I was learning in school to question the narratives women’s magazines were selling us about beauty, our bodies, and where a woman belongs (this was the late ‘80s). Steinem gave me the larger frame: media shapes what society sees. Change the coverage and you change what society has to reckon with.
This helped inspire me to become a journalist.
Second: Change requires people to gather in person.
That now sounds almost quaintly radical now. You have to get in a room with other people.
In the 1970s, Steinem helped champion consciousness-raising circles: small groups of women sitting together and saying out loud what they had each assumed was theirs alone. A woman would hear her own life described by someone else in the room and understand she wasn’t the only one carrying it. The shame would leave. Second-wave feminists called this “the click” or the “aha moment.” Decades later, I heard Steinem talk about using phones as organizing tools. Sure, she said, they can tell you where the meeting is. But then you have to go to the meeting. Her point: Posting is not organizing. Somewhere, an algorithm shuddered.
Third: Change requires coalition.
Steinem became the most recognizable face of American feminism, but she built alongside Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Florynce Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Smeal, Kathy Spillar, Dolores Huerta, and many others.
That matters, because history likes to turn movements into biographies. One leader. One famous name.
Steinem taught that actual change is messier and more crowded. She argued that it comes from alliances, arguments, meetings and emails and making common cause with people who might not share whole worldviews.
When I interviewed Steinem for the last time, in 2022, Roe had just been overturned. I asked her about passing the baton.
She corrected the premise.
“I do have to recognize my own age, but I’m not passing the baton,” she told me. “I’m keeping the baton, but understanding that we each have a baton; there’s not just one.”
That may be the best way to think about Gloria Steinem’s death at 92. Not as the end of an era in which one famous feminist carried a movement and mission forward. There was never one baton.
There are still millions of them.
Also in this newsletter: No verdict for Lindsay Clancy. New rules for big beef. Cybercab meets the regulators. Trump’s arch jumps the gun. Missouri’s map gets blocked. And Gloria Steinem, 1934-2026.
No Consensus: The Massachusetts judge overseeing theLindsey Clancy casedeclared a mistrial after the nine women and three men in the jury failed to reach a verdictafter seven daysandmore than 38 hours of deliberations. Earlier, Clancy’s defense lawyerasked the judge to remove one of the jurors, arguing the holdout refused to follow the court’s instructions (and the law) on reasonable doubt. It seems thatone juror insisted on Clancy’s guilt, while the other 10 wanted to acquit. [Clancy admitted to killing her three children. Her defense argues she suffered from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally liable. The prosecutors say she committed murder. Catch up on the case] The judgehereandhere.questioned the jurorsbut declined to remove the holdout and declared a mistrial. Prosecutors can now retry Clancy with a new jury, pursue different charges, negotiate a plea deal, or drop the case. They areexpected to try againwith a new jury. A status conference is set for September 29. For now, Clancy is expected to remain inan inpatient psychiatric facility.Back In the Jungle: Trumpannounced a programintended tomake it easier for ranchers to process their own meatand sell it to consumers, without going through USDA-inspected processing facilities. Four companiescontrol about 85% of U.S. beef processing, a situation Trump called a “nasty monopoly.” Some experts andindustry groups warnedthat loosening federal inspection requirements will endanger the public and undermine public trust. One small meat processor who encouraged people to vote for Trump in 2024 calledthe idea of relaxing regulations“crazy.”
Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Regulations: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationopened an investigationinto Tesla’s new Cybercab, hours after Tesla put the driverless taxis on public roads in Austin. The carslack certain features, like steering wheels and brake pedals, that are mandatory under decades-old federal safety regulations. (Manual controls are required.) Tesla insists its new robotaxisnevertheless comply with safety regulations, a claim federal regulators will investigate.Ask Forgiveness, Not Permission: Interior Secretary Doug Burgumannouncedexcavation for Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch in D.C. will begin in the next two weeks. The project still lacks final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission. The administration has not completed a review under the National Historic Preservation Act. The FAA has not finalized areview of its potential impact on flights.And it still faces alawsuit arguing, among other things, that construction requires congressional authorization. The administrationargued that lawsuit should be dismissed, citing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing construction of Trump’s ballroom to continue.Partial Justice: Christian Castro, the ICE agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan man and then lying about it, is infederal custody, this time on charges that he lied to investigators. He had recently been released from a Texas jail after Gov. Greg Abbott refused to extradite him to Minnesota. Federal prosecutor Matthew Evans had pushed for more serious civil-rights charges, but DOJ officials directed him toproceed with the false-statements case, according to ProPublica. “I objected in the strongest possible terms,” Evanstold attorneys for the victims. The DOJ reportedlyfired him and may be investigatingwhether he leaked information about the case. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellisonsaid the federal indictment does“not reflect the full seriousness of the violent crimes” Castro faces in Minnesota, and the state’s case will continue. Catch up on that case by watching my interview with Ellisonhere.Rollin’ Coal: Theaverage price of diesel hit a record $5.85 a gallon. That means higher transportation costs for many everyday goods, including groceries. The rise is largely because oil prices have started climbing yet again, now that Trump hasrenewed military strikes on Iran.Whiplash: The U.S.added 162,000 jobs in August, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest jobs report,more than triple what many economists expected. The government also revised June and July numbers up by a combined55,000 jobs. Unemployment heldsteadyat 4.1%. Butannual wage growth slumpedto 3.1%, a five-year low.Rate This: The surprisingly strong jobs reportraised expectationsfor another Fed rate hike. Trumpresponded by threateningto “STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT” if Fed Chair Kevin Warsh doesn’t push rates down to “the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World.”
Small Victory: Missouri’s Supreme Court unanimouslyblocked a new Trump-backed voting mapfrom being used in the midterms. Republicans drew the map in a way thatalmost guaranteed the Democrats losing a House seat, and the GOP picking one up. Thecourt restoredthe previous map for November and allowed voters to weigh in on the new one by referendum. Missouri’s Republican attorney general said she would appeal to the Supreme Court.
She Made More Possible: Gloria Steinem, a trailblazing leader of second-wave, feminism, died at 92. Theannouncement on her social mediadid not list a cause, but said she died at home, surrounded by “some of the many who loved her.” For more than 60 years, Steinem fought for a world in which women had the same rights, freedoms and possibilities as men. Achievements thatmany take for granted— like the right to open a credit card without a husband’s permission, or protections against being fired for being pregnant, or laws criminalizing marital rape — were widely considered unimaginable when she began her activism work. “I feel proud,” shesaid in 2022of the progress she helped make. “And I feel mad as hell. We are still dealing with the same issues.” Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. Her parents divorced when she was 10. Steinem spent much of her childhood caring for her mother, whose struggles with mental illness and treatment by employers and doctors would shape her understanding of women’s inequality. After graduating from Smith College, she traveled in India,where she learned from activists about grassroots organizing. Around this time, at 22, she had an abortion in London, then still illegal. She later dedicated her memoir to the doctor who performed it, recalling that heasked in return that she live her life how she wanted. “I wasn’t going to let things happen to me,”she later said. “I was going to direct my life.” She moved to New York and began a career in journalism. Though she did not yet identify as a feminist — shepreferred the term humanist— she chafed at the restrictions on women reporters, who were largely consigned to so-called women’s pages and frequently dismissed by male editors. She struggled to get serious political assignments and in the early 1960s went undercover at New York City’s Playboy Club,publishing an exposéof the exploitative conditions women workers – “Bunnies” – faced there. A few years later, in 1968, she helped foundNew Yorkmagazine. Steinem’s turn to feminist activism came the following year, when she attended an abortion “speak out” as a reporter and heard women discuss their illegal abortions. “It was the big click,”she later said. It was the realization that this wasn’t a private pain, but, in the view of feminists, the result of a system that didn’t allow women true freedom. “Once the light began to dawn,” she said, “I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured out any of this before.” Soon after, she published the essay, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which sought to link the Civil Rights and second-wave feminist movements. In 1971 she joined Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and h…
