I don’t know how you begin to sum up the impact of Gloria Steinem’s life, except to say that almost every moment I’ve walked through the world as a woman has probably been paved, in some small or enormous way, by her advocacy.

Steinem lived a remarkable 92 years before her death on Sept. 2. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, campaigned tirelessly for social justice, launched Ms. Magazine, led generations of marches and ignited countless life-changing epiphanies.

If you haven’t read her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” now is a great time.

She wrote about learning to read by sounding out street signs. She lived an itinerant childhood and didn’t go to elementary school; her dad rarely had steady work and moved the family from town to town. Her mother, prone to anxiety attacks, rarely joined them.

“The culture had told me, and I believed well past 50, that if you were on the road, you didn’t have a home, and if you had a home — especially for women — you didn’t go on the road,” she told me during a 2015 interview. “Over the course of writing the book, I discovered that we all need both.”

She wrote about becoming radicalized at Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington speech. She was standing next to a Black woman named Mrs. Greene, a clerk in segregated Washington during the Truman administration, who pointed out that there were no women on stage that day, save for Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. And Height wasn’t even asked to........

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