Shannon Watts
I was born in 1971, the year before Gloria Steinem helped launch Ms. magazine. It’s hard to explain to younger women what Ms. meant to those of us who grew up with it. It showed us women who were questioning the rules, challenging power, and refusing to accept that the world simply had to stay the way it was. Gloria helped make that kind of woman visible and possible. After Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, I was invited to Gloria’s home with a small group of women. We were angry, exhausted, and trying to figure out what came next. By then, Gloria had spent more than half a century doing this: bringing women together in her home to talk, organize, strategize, argue, and figure out how to keep going. And she was still doing exactly that until just before she died. Because Gloria understood something fundamental about women and activism: movements are built in living rooms. Women activists of my generation inherited so much from Gloria Steinem: a world in which a woman allowed themselves to be outspoken, ambitious, political, angry, strategic, and powerful. There is a direct line from women like Gloria, who insisted on taking up space when women were expected to stay quiet, to women like me who were able to build organizations, lead movements, and demand change. Gloria Steinem helped make my activism and the activism of millions of women possible. Not just by breaking barriers herself, but by creating space for generations of women to come through behind her.
