I’m grateful for the role Gloria Steinem played from the 70s to the 90s

Guardian US columnist and author

As far as I can tell, the US women’s movement was mostly clustered in coastal cities and university towns until Ms magazine, which Gloria Steinem cofounded and for many years co-managed, made it national. My mother in suburban California was an early subscriber and I was a tween who voraciously devoured every issue. I think it played a role in stiffening her resolve and her sense of her own rights, which led to her leaving my violent father.

Some of the hot takes I’m seeing now on Steinem, and the women’s movement she was at the heart of, act as reminders that a lot of people have no idea of what women’s lives were like before second-wave feminism. Of how women were routinely described as weaker, less intelligent, less rational and less objective than men, and therefore less believable, less qualified to work, testify, participate. No understanding of how utterly disempowered and excluded women were in both law and society, how women were rendered radically unequal economically in so many ways, including exclusion from professions and education and without rights to equal pay, to be free from workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. No memory of how marriage was a relationship of radical inequality in which a woman surrendered many rights and her identity to her husband, not even reserving the right to say no to sex until pressure from feminists made marital rape a crime in a growing number of American states in the 1970s and 1980s.

We now face a huge backlash, maybe even huger than the backlash we’ve always faced, but I believe feminism is just getting going in reversing not centuries but millennia of patriarchy, and I’m grateful for the role Gloria Steinem played in giving those decades of the 1970s to 1990s the transformative momentum that has made my life so much better, in so many ways, than my mother’s, let alone my grandmother’s.

Her relationships with women of colour informed her feminist activism

French journalist, writer, film-maker, activist and Guardian Europe columnist

Gloria Steinem understood early on that the feminist struggle would be fought through the media as well as campaigning, and inspired generations of journalists, myself included. As co-founder of Ms magazine, the first in the US run entirely by women, she strengthened the connection between journalism and activism.

Steinem’s feminism was more attentive to race than that of many of her white contemporaries in the “second wave”. Her first explicitly feminist essay, After Black Power, Women’s Liberation, displays a keen understanding of the need to connect feminist struggles with other movements for justice. She wrote about poor women and mothers, and imagined an alliance between radical feminists, middle-class women and “poor women of all colors”, although some of the dated terminology may now appear offensive. Her relationships with prominent women of colour – including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Shirley Chisholm and Wilma Mankiller – informed every aspect of her work. As she acknowledged: “Personally, I learned feminism disproportionately from Black women.” In 1971, she served as treasurer of the fund for the legal defence of Angela Davis, the Black feminist philosopher unjustly prosecuted for murder who faced the death penalty.

Steinem leveraged her privilege as an educated white woman with access to elite media circles, but could not escape the dynamics of public life that made hers “the face of feminism” within a diverse and collective movement: the names of the women of colour who stood alongside her have not left the same imprint on public memory.

While I admired Steinem immensely, I regretted that her feminism remained so closely aligned with the Democratic party. This led her to defend Bill Clinton in 1998 and minimise Monica Lewinsky’s allegations, before acknowledging this failing two decades later. Her support for Hillary Clinton also exposed the limits........

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