Gloria Steinem Stayed Positive, Even as the Manosphere Took Hold

For decades, Gloria Steinem invited women into her Upper East Side apartment, a cozy space packed with mementos from her life as a crusading feminist. The women participated in her famous “talking circles,” shared stories and talked political strategy.

And in recent years, after the fall of Roe v. Wade and the election of Donald Trump, some of the attendees arrived with the expectation that their host would feel as despairing as they did.

“People would walk in and say, ‘God, she’s going to be so depressed,’” said Cindi Leive, an executive producer of “Dear Ms.” a documentary series on the magazine Ms. Steinem co-founded. “This woman is seeing everything she’s worked for crumble all around her.”

But people who were close to Ms. Steinem, who died on Wednesday at 92, said that she was more focused on counting victories than defeats, even in her later years when feminism was dealt a series of bruising setbacks. As reality shows and social media influencers glorifying traditional gender roles help shape popular culture, and access to contraceptives and abortion was abruptly curtailed in many states, Ms. Steinem held a longer view, her friends said.

After she made speeches at college campuses and conferences, she would come back home with stories of the progress that she was seeing around the country, a continuation of the transformations that she helped usher in beginning in the 1970s.

“She felt that battles were unfinished,” said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who with Ms. Steinem and other women founded Ms. magazine. “But she focused me and everybody else on the future. She really didn’t want to give the tradwives and the manosphere the credit for being long-lasting.”

The morning after Ms. Steinem’s death, tributes from admirers poured in from around the world. Many people credited Ms. Steinem’s activism for creating opportunity, for making it possible for women to choose whatever they wanted with their lives. Her work challenged a status quo that left women vulnerable to domestic violence, with far fewer legal rights than men and scant opportunities in the work force.

“Over the decades, she became one of the architects of the entire structure of women’s equality,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, wrote on social media.

But amid the praise, there were also questions: Was the work she led being slowly undone in recent years? Was Ms. Steinem right to remain stubbornly positive about the future of women’s rights, even as antipathy toward women seems to keep flaring hotter? And maybe most urgently, during this unsteady moment in feminism, should there be someone who can pick up her mantle and lead with authority?

“It’s hard to think that there’s a single person or a single organization” leading the charge, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, who credited her with broadening the women’s movement across class and race. “There are so many folks writing and thinking about these issues that it’s hard to have any one entity hold up that mantle. Our world is more diffuse.”

Some of feminism’s gains are well established, she said, pointing out that women are running corporations and outnumbering men in law schools. “We’re not talking gender balance, but certainly very different from where it was in the early ’70s,” she said. “Progress has been slow and painful.”

That progress led to successive waves of backlash, from Phyllis Schlafly’s winning campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment to the current manosphere, where there is even debate over whether to remove women’s right to vote.

Still, many younger people have a hard time imagining the sweeping economic, political and social changes could ever be rolled back, said Marcia Ann Gillespie, a former editor of Essence and a longtime editor at Ms magazine.

And in the 2016 campaign, when Mr. Trump promised to appoint judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade, there was not enough urgency among women to address the threat to abortion rights, Ms. Gillespie said. “The kind of energy that would have been needed simply wasn’t there,” she said. “The last thing we can ever do is assume that because something is, it will always be.”

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Ms. Steinem shied away from questions of legacy during her lifetime. When people asked her who she was going to “give her torch” to, she found the question irritating.

“I’m keeping my torch. And I’m using it to light other people’s torches,” she said. “Because the whole idea that there is only one torch is the problem.”

That instinct to identify and encourage like-minded activists and thinkers across lines of race, class, age and even sex was a constant in her work long before “intersectionality” became a progressive buzzword, said the writer Susan Faludi.

“For so many years she knitted together the big baggy state of feminism,” Ms. Faludi said. “It was almost an instinct with her.”

Ms. Faludi met Ms. Steinem in the early 1990s, when Ms. Steinem cold-called her soon after the publication of Ms. Faludi’s book, “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.” Soon after, they appeared together on the cover of Time magazine, with the headline, “Fighting the Backlash Against Feminism.”

“She just took me under her wing as she did over and over and over with young women,” Ms. Faludi said. “In this very old-fashioned way, she was a mother to the movement.”

When Ms. Gillespie stepped down as editor of Essence magazine in 1980, she said, Ms. Steinem was one of the first people to call, with an invitation to become a contributing writer at Ms.

In 1998, the two women raised money to purchase Ms. magazine from a male entrepreneur. They later crisscrossed the country together, speaking to audiences and raising more funds for the magazine they both loved, with help from Ms. Steinem’s impressive Rolodex.

“She got the fact that not everyone was meant to agree with her and not every woman was automatically a feminist and not all feminists thought alike,” Ms. Gillespie said. “That has proven to be one of the truths of this movement.”

Still, like many magazines, Ms. has fallen in stature and influence as the internet took hold. And some other Steinem-era feminist groups, like the National Women’s Political Caucus, have also frayed over time.

At a shaky moment for the causes and institutions Ms. Steinem devoted her life to, many of the women who were close to her over the years — or were just touched by her — see themselves as part of her legacy.

“She told me, ‘You’re an itinerant feminist organizer, that’s what you are, that’s what we are,’” recalled Shelby Knox, who unexpectedly became Ms. Steinem’s roommate in 2007. Ms. Steinem had offered her home to someone in a young women’s leadership program, while she was away at a summer writer’s retreat.

A week into Ms. Knox’s stay, Ms. Steinem arrived home, having left the retreat early.

Ms. Steinem, then in her 70s, insisted Ms. Knox stay. And even though there was a 50-year age gap, the women became close.

“I always called her my mentor and she hated that,” Ms. Knox remembered. “She was like, ‘No, no, we’re learning from each other.’”

Still, Ms. Steinem gave her plenty of advice: Don’t go to graduate school, don’t be afraid to disagree with your elders — and don’t get discouraged.

“She always reminded me historically of how short a time we had been fighting this fight,” Ms. Knox said. “And the more successful we are, the more backlash there will be.”

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