An important feminist figure died today. She’s not the first one, nor will she be the last one.
Gloria Steinem was someone who was not afraid of what people thought. She was relentless in her pursuit of women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and equality, but what I find more interesting about her now is how she managed to make people question things they had stopped questioning.
In 1978, she wrote If Men Could Menstruate— one of the most powerful essays ever written. She imagined a world where men got their periods instead of women, and suddenly menstruation would not be something embarrassing or inconvenient. It would be something to brag about. There would be government-funded menstrual supplies, scientific research, special awards for men who menstruated the most, and probably some very expensive clubs where men could get together and talk about their “monthly strength.” The joke is obvious, but the point underneath it is much harder to ignore: if men menstruated, we would probably have built an entirely different culture around menstruation.
That is who Gloria Steinem was. She could take something completely ordinary and make it look strange again. She made you realize that a lot of the things we accept as “just the way things are” are actually decisions that were made by someone, somewhere, at some point. And once you realize that, it becomes a little harder to believe that those things have to stay that way.
I think about this whenever I hear people talk about the women who came before us as if they belong to some distant feminist history. We talk about them in the past tense, put their names in books, turn them into photographs in black and white, and then go back to our own lives. But so much of what feels completely normal about being a woman today is the result of someone else deciding that normal was not good enough.
We inherit things without realizing that we inherited them. I’m still in awe at the fact that I am the first woman in my family who can study, work, write, have my own money, live alone, decide whether I want children, talk openly about my body, have opinions that people might disagree with and still consider myself a perfectly ordinary woman. None of that feels particularly radical when you are twenty-two. That is probably the whole point. Progress is most successful when the next generation gets to experience it as normal.
We do not have to see the woman who fought for something every time we use it. We do not think about the woman who was the first in her family to go to university when we walk into a classroom. We do not think about the women who were fired, mocked, ignored, called difficult, selfish, hysterical, unfeminine or worse when we negotiate a salary or decide that we want a life that looks different from our mother’s. Most of the time, we just live.
That is what women like Steinem wanted. Not to be remembered forever as women who had to fight, but to make it possible for other women to spend less of their lives fighting the same fights.
Still, reading If Men Could Menstruate almost fifty years later makes it obvious that there are things we have not moved very far from. Steinem’s entire argument depends on what would happen if something associated with women suddenly belonged to men? Would we still think of it as weak? Would we still laugh at it? Would we still hide it? Or would we find a way to make it powerful?
We do this with more than periods. We do it with ambition, too. Confidence sounds different depending on who is speaking. So does anger. So does wanting more. A man can be incredibly ambitious and people will call him driven. A woman can have the exact same ambition and suddenly there is a conversation about whether she is too much. There are still certain qualities that women are expected to soften before bringing them into a room.
Steinem understood that these contradictions were worth pointing out, even when pointing them out made people uncomfortable. She spent her career writing, organizing, speaking and making herself impossible to ignore. She helped create Ms. because there were things happening in women’s lives that mainstream magazines were not interested in treating seriously. The magazine became part of a larger movement, but it was also something more basic: a place where women could see their own experiences reflected back at them and understand that they were not isolated— THEY WERE NOT ALONE.
That part feels especially relevant now. We have more places to speak than ever. Anyone can publish something. Anyone can start a newsletter, make a magazine, post an essay, build a community. But having a voice and having someone actually listen are still two very different things.
That is one of the reasons it matters to remember women like Steinem beyond the headlines about her death. She was not simply someone who had strong opinions about women’s rights. She understood the importance of making those opinions part of culture. She wrote for magazines. She spoke on television. She showed up. She made feminism something people encountered outside of books and political meetings, something that could exist in the middle of everyday life. And there were so many women doing versions of the same thing.
Some became famous and some never did. Some wrote books that are still read. Others simply made a decision that changed the expectations for everyone who came after them. A mother who decided to go back to school. A woman who left a marriage. A woman who called off a wedding. Someone who opened a business when no woman in her family had ever owned one. Someone who purchased her first apartment alone. Someone who said no when saying yes would have been easier. Someone who told her daughter she could become whatever she wanted.
These women rarely think of themselves as part of history. Most people living through it have no idea that is what they are doing.
We talk about inheriting money, houses, jewelry, names. But women inherit possibilities, too. Sometimes they come from famous women whose names we know. More often, they come from women whose names we don’t. The woman behind your mother, behind her mother, behind the woman who first decided that her life could look different.
Gloria Steinem was one of those women. She happened to have a public life large enough for us to see the work she was doing. But she was never the only one. We are living inside choices that someone else had to make possible. The question now is what we are going to make possible for the women after us.
Image credit: Neal Boenzi; ‘Gloria Steinem in New York‘, 1984.