Gloria Steinem never stopped believing women could change the world. Over the past week tributes have been pouring in for this American feminist icon, journalist and organiser who died on 2 September aged 92.

Gloria Steinem spent a lifetime refusing to accept that inequality was inevitable. Steinem helped establish the second wave women’s movement in the United States that influenced the growth of feminism as a movement powered by the everyday experiences of injustice and by a transformative political and economic philosophy.

In the US she helped take feminism from consciousness-raising circles into magazines, workplaces, universities, legislatures and living rooms. She co-founded Ms. Magazine and, with activists such as Shirley Chisolm and Betty Friedman, the National Women’s Political Caucus, she spent more than five decades campaigning for women’s civil and reproductive rights. 

But perhaps her greatest contribution was working with other women to connect experiences dismissed as personal – discrimination, violence, unequal pay, racism reproductive control, the burden of care – with systemic sexism, and patriarchal control that necessitates political solutions.

Her feminism also grew beyond a narrow idea of equality. 

Steinem insisted that sexism cannot be separated from racism, economic injustice or other forces that determine whose lives and voices matter. She built coalitions across the spectrum of women combatting exploitation and oppression, including with militant figures like Angela Davis and agricultural worker leader Dolores Huerta and later key women in the #MeToo movement. She understood that movements belonged not to famous leaders but to the people within them. 

WEL owes her a particular debt.

The feminist uprising of the early 1970s was transnational with diverse emphases. It was interconnected with other radical movements of the era, including the anti-war and anti-colonial movements. 

In Australia, Indigenous women such as Faith Bandler and Pearl Gibbs had set an example for women’s political leadership when, with other Indigenous women leaders and feminists such as Jessie Street, they led the 1967 campaign for Indigenous to have the right to vote. 

Women began to organise through the women’s liberation movement, which then seeded a plethora of activist strands including the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972. 

A WEL founder, Wendy McCarthy AC, reports that WEL based our successful 1972 campaign directly on Steinem’s Ms. Magazine precedent of polling women and political candidates on where they stood on issues such as childcare, abortion and equal pay. 

Wendy McCarthy recalls the enthusiasm of legendary Melbourne WEL co-founder Beatrice Faust for this approach, which led WEL to adopt it for the 1972 election campaign. We have used many variations of this method ever since, with the WEL Scorecard our ‘How to Vote’ guide in every federal election.

Steinem may have also influenced an early Women’s Liberation action intended to highlight the criminalisation of abortion as one of the most potent instruments of male control over women’s bodies.
 
In October 1972 (just before the 1972 elections) an advertisement in the Australian Weekly ‘Nation Review” listed names and signatures of 80 Australian women under the heading ‘We have had abortions and are willing to admit it in the interests of legislative change’. Wendy McCarthy’s was one signature. Steinem’s Ms Magazine had adopted this tactic with 53 prominent US women including Steinem earlier in that year.

In Australia abortion was finally decriminalised nationwide in September 2023. But in the United States, as a warning that rights won can become rights lost, the constitutional protection for abortion established by Roe v Wade in 1973 is gone. In 2026, 13 states enforce total abortion bans, while many others impose restrictions before viability. New legislative efforts have sought to criminalise abortion and establish foetal ‘personhood’. 

In Australia and many other jurisdictions reproductive rights are being challenged and again under threat from a resurgent far right.

Gloria Steinem understood something fundamental about political progress: it is not inevitable and there is no finish line. Every generation inherits both the victories and the unfinished struggles of the women before it. She taught us that equality is never bestowed. It must be organised for, argued for, voted for and won.