Gloria Steinem: The Work of Imagining Otherwise

Last Wednesday marked the passing of Gloria Steinem at 92, closing a public life that had stretched across more than half a century of writing, organising and campaigning for women’s equality. From the early years of second-wave feminism to the final decade of her life, Steinem helped bring questions of work, political power, reproductive freedom and violence against women into public conversation, and stayed with them as the terms of those debates changed around her. One of her reflections on imagination feels especially resonant now:

Gloria Steinem: “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

Imagining Otherwise

Steinem came to feminism in her mid-thirties, after attending a 1969 speak-out where women described the illegal abortions they had undergone. She later called the experience “the big click”, and much of her later work returned to the insight that experiences treated as private could reveal the shape of a public problem. When the women’s movement began, she often recalled, there was not even a common term for sexual harassment. Practices now recognised as discrimination or abuse were woven so thoroughly into everyday life that naming them was itself a challenge to the status quo.

Again and again, Steinem worked at the boundary between what society treated as settled and what she believed could be changed. In 1971, she and other feminists created Ms. magazine to write seriously about subjects conventional women’s magazines routinely neglected, from equal pay and reproductive rights to domestic violence. The first issue was expected to sell fewer than 20,000 copies; all 300,000 sold within eight days. Its reception revealed how much appetite already existed for a publication willing to take those subjects seriously. Steinem’s ambition reached beyond asking for more within the terms already available to women, towards creating new language, institutions and possibilities for lives the culture had scarcely begun to imagine differently.

Building What Comes Next

Steinem’s organising gave those ideas somewhere to go. She helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus to bring more women into public office, supported rape crisis centres and shelters, co-founded the Women’s Media Center, and spent decades travelling, fundraising and working alongside other activists. Public speaking frightened her, so she often shared the stage with fellow organisers, including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, whose perspective on race, class and motherhood widened the conversations they led together.

She lived long enough to see some of the changes she had fought for become part of ordinary life, and long enough to watch old battles return. In 2022, she described herself as proud and “mad as hell” that women were still confronting many of the same issues. She continued writing, travelling and organising into her nineties. Her Manhattan home, where some of the earliest meetings for Ms. had taken place, now belongs to Gloria’s Foundation and will remain a place for women to meet, speak and organise. The home continues a role it had played for decades, as a place where conversation could become collective action.

Values in Focus

Steinem’s words speak to the Laidlaw value of being #Ambitious and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Transcendence. Her ambition was expansive in a practical sense, asking how far social arrangements might change once people stopped treating them as fixed. Transcendence sits alongside that in her future-facing imagination, the ability to picture possibilities beyond the present while remaining grounded enough to organise towards them. Across her career, dreaming and planning were rarely far apart.

A Call to Reflect

As you consider Gloria Steinem’s words, we invite you to reflect and share in the comments: what in your field, community or own life have you accepted as fixed, and what might become possible if you imagined it otherwise?