The famous feminist who died last week was generous to other women and never stopped learning or being interested. And at a difficult time, when things are often hostile, we have a duty to fight to uphold her legacy, writes the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach
Susie Orbach
The Independent – Sunday 06 September 2026 06:00
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/gloria-steinem-feminism-inclusion-b3044683.html
In the early 1980’s Luise Eichenbaum, Carol Bloom and I from The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute (WTCI) went to talk to Gloria Steinem at Ms. magazine about what we then called ‘Feminist Therapy’. We were there to discuss the work we were doing to help women undo the inheritance of psychological structures of internalised inferiority which needed to be understood. Gloria wasn’t much interested at the time and I remember being somewhat disappointed. Even more so when her book on self esteem came out which seemed so superficial and surface.
But in 1992, she was one of our celebrated speakers at the WTCI’s 10th Annual Speak Out on body oppression. She couldn’t have been more generous and more attentive to what women were saying. She never stopped learning. She never stopped being interested. She never stopped growing.
In these bleak moments, to remember Gloria Steinem is to remember hope, generosity and inclusion.
The incredible success of her political project of insisting that those who had been voiceless – the girls and women, the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, the excluded, and the condemned – expand the human family beyond the preoccupations and interest of patriarchy and profit by telling their stories. She made spaces for their hardships to be heard and for their struggles to transform the conditions that had so hurt and harmed them.
In the United States, the Women’s Liberation Movement came out of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the Anti-Vietnam war Movement. The influences of the latter two were folded into Gloria’s understandings and organising as her reach expanded beyond her journalism to the circles of women meeting to understand themselves and learning how their experiences growing up had corseted and constrained them.
She understood too from her personal history, the significance of the mother-daughter relationship, of poverty, of what it meant to be an outsider, of how it was to be an itinerant as well as being welcomed – as she was – into the privileges she gained through attending the elite women‘s college Smith.
She was no leftist. Analysing the structure of capitalism didn’t suit her despite her considerable grasp on the oppressions of farm workers, of the legal structures of racism – now once again so horrifyingly evident. She led from her heart and from what women said. She wrote about abortion, about marital rape, about the consequences of slavery and of course the Playboy Bunnies. Despite a shyness of speaking in public, she did so eloquently and she always endeavoured to bring other women to platforms to speak in their own words.
From small meetings, to her journalism, to creating MS magazine and speaking on endless platforms for small and large groups, Gloria allied with other struggles giving space to and highlighting the plight of oppressed and colonised minorities coming forward to demand recognition. She was a brilliant organiser who once awakened to the notion of feminism, crusaded, talked, listened and gathered with people across the globe who were trying to – and who did – change the world.
There was nothing tired or hackneyed about her and her advocacy. Time and again, she would write or say something original and startling which allowed one to think again. I look at my collection of feminist books and think how many of the early ones she inspired and supported. She was three quarters of a generation above me. With the giants of The Women’s Liberation Movement, Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millett, Flo Kennedy, Shirley Chisolm, Vivien Gornick, Adrienne Rich, Shulamit Firestone and many others, she created a world that meant my ten-year old daughter once wondered out loud if women had been slaves in the times of Jane Austen.
She will be remembered and treasured for what she and her cohort contributed to transforming the climate for girls, for boys, for sexualities and ideas challenging gender conformity. She will be remembered for always showing up. She will be remembered for her wit and cleverness. She will be remembered for the spaces she created for new ideas and new possibilities of engagement. Our duty is to fight to maintain that legacy and the many progressive strands it continues to open up despite an often difficult and hostile environment.
Susie Orbach is a writer, psychoanalyst, activist, and author of 14 books including ‘Fat is a Feminist issue’
