Deborah Frances-White: Gloria Steinem inspired sisterhood wherever she went. She was my hero

“A movement has to be moving somewhere. Where is feminism going?” I heard Gloria Steinem say this from the stage on 27 February 2016 at the Bath book festival. I had gone there especially to see her speak, and that sentence stayed with me. I’ve revisited it every time I’ve felt myself or my community losing direction. I had started the Guilty Feminist podcast only two months before and I took my shot to tell her about my show as she signed my book. She really looked into my eyes, and smiled. “Please keep going,” she said and then gave me her suggested reading list off the top of her head. 

The next time we met was in New York in January 2020. It was my first Guilty Feminist show in the US, at the Gramercy theatre. My co-host was the not-yet-famous, pre-Hacks, spit-take-funny, 24-year-old Hannah Einbinder. The conversation sang. It was a terrific night. Everything you’d hope for. But the producers had, without my knowledge, sold meet-and-greet backstage pass tickets to have a photo with me. I told the audience if they’d bought such a ticket they’d wildly underestimated how accessible I am. I’ll talk to anyone for nothing. So that’s where I was, both meeting and greeting, when my friend Wesley called me: “Deborah, the bouncer doesn’t recognise Gloria Steinem. I’ve told him she’s America’s most famous feminist. He said he’s never heard of her and won’t let her back and she is trying to get in to meet you, so I’m giving her my backstage pass.”

Thank god for Wesley. Otherwise Gloria would have wandered off into the night and I’d have been none the wiser. She was so kind and said she loved the show and how important it was that we were managing to make feminism a funny, joyful space. That we needed more magnetic places like this. I told her I’d love to have her on the show as a matriarch of feminism. She looked rather put out and said “I’m not a matriarch!” 

It was as if I had called her old or considered her wise when she was still very much a hands-on, grassroots part of the action. I recovered and said I’d love to have her guest on the show as an important contemporary voice. She pulled a bit of card off a flyer in her handbag and hand-wrote out her email address in beautiful script. “Email me.” By the time I found the courage to use it, she was in a housebound, writing phase. She kindly did a Zoom fundraiser for New York friends at my request, a little later. I put her makeshift card on my fridge. It’s still there, under a magnet of Gertrude Stein. 

On 24 June 2022, Roe v Wade was overturned. I thought of Gloria. She had campaigned tirelessly and bravely for reproductive rights for decades. She was by then years of age; I wanted to write and say “I’m sorry, that was such a big part of your legacy”. I couldn’t imagine being in the final chapter of my life and feeling like we were losing everything we’d fought so hard to win. A movement has to be moving somewhere. Are we in reverse?

In November 2024, just weeks after the shocking news that Trump had won again, I received an invitation to a feminist roundtable in New York at Gloria’s house. Her lovely assistant Jill invited me. She said they happened quite frequently, but that right now it felt like an emergency. I arrived at her Manhattan brownstone, where she’d lived for almost 50 years. I loitered around out the front until I saw some other likely types going in and befriended them on the sidewalk. 

We entered a jewellery box of treasures from her travels in time and space. Paintings and rugs, photographs and lamps. It wasn’t extravagant so much as layered with love and bolstered for beauty. There she held conversations with women, old and young, with every intersection of marginalisation and access. She was the connective tissue between the generations, the schools of thought, the books written and those still being written. 

There were powerful women there with global platforms and 20-year-olds with an idea, a dream and new spin on everything. Everyone was talking about how to resist and exist in the wake of a new Trump presidency. I pitched my idea for the Road to Gilead project, fighting the far right and the American Christian nationalist movement in the UK. Gloria was very encouraging but worried not enough people would understand the term Gilead. She connected me to other women in the room that I might partner with. 

At a quiet moment, during the mixer, I had a word with her. “I’m sorry about Roe,” I said. “I know it’s such a big part of your legacy.” My eyes welled up a little. 

She took both my hands in hers and looked into my eyes. “Oh, Deborah,” she said, “that’s patriarchy. We don’t let that affect our work. We had abortion before Roe. We had it during Roe in places where they made it impossible. We will have it after Roe. Because we have each other. We never let them dictate the terms. We get around whatever block or barrier they put up, because we have sisterhood.”

There was a light coming out of her that I felt radiate into me. This was the secret to her resilience. She didn’t see the world in terms of wins and losses. She saw it in terms of how we get where we need to go. She was not an uncontroversial figure. 

As with all influential people who live a long life, she had her critics and had made her mis-steps. But I think what I saw in my final conversation with her was her real legacy. A movement needs to be moving somewhere, but we need to change course all the time. We need to be agile and responsive as well as intentional. The real question is perhaps not where we are moving, but how we are moving. And she had one answer to that: we are moving together.

Deborah Frances-White hosts The Guilty Feminist podcast. Her latest book ‘Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have’ is published in paperback by Virago. Buy at a discounted price in the Nerve’s bookshop here.