What struck me about Meghan’s tribute to Gloria Steinem wasn’t the fact that she could call Gloria a friend, mentor, co‑conspirator in the long project of women’s freedom. It was how right it felt.
A woman born into a world Gloria helped build, remembering her as a blueprint, rather than an icon. A younger generation living inside victories so complete, so absorbed into daily life, that most people forget they were victories at all.
And I wonder how many people truly grasp the scale of what Gloria changed.
We know the name. We know the journalism, the marches, the quotes that became slogans. But the deeper legacy, the structural one, is harder to see - precisely because it succeeded, because it dissolved into the everyday.
The woman who assumes she’ll have a career. The woman who speaks openly about ambition. The woman who expects agency, who believes her body belongs to her. None of that was inevitable. None of it was “natural” or “just happened.”
Feminism’s impact was never confined to women. It rewired expectations about relationships, families, labour, and power. About who gets to be fully human. It challenged a social order that constrained men as well as women, even if women carried the heavier chains. Gloria made that challenge impossible to ignore.
Which is why Meghan’s tribute lands with such clarity. She didn’t memorialise the mythic figure. She remembered the woman who invested in other women, who believed in female friendship as infrastructure. The woman who gave advice, loved children, and made people feel seen.
And then there’s that perfect story: the little girl who didn’t know who Gloria was. Gloria’s answer - that it didn’t matter, it only mattered that the girl knew who she was.
That’s the quiet genius of a legacy like Gloria’s. It isn’t measured in name recognition, but in the millions of people living with freedoms their grandmothers couldn’t imagine. Freedoms so normalised they may not even realise that someone had to fight for them.
Gloria Steinem’s name will be remembered. But the more important truth is that the world she helped reshape is now so woven into daily life that countless people will never know how different things might have been without her.
