Gloria Steinem: Our job is to discover who our daughters are–and build a world that deserves them
Courtesy of Erin Grau
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Gloria Steinem and I were in the back of a taxi coming home from a holiday party downtown. Our conversation drifted to my daughters, Matilda and Frankie, as it often did. Our taxi was slowly crawling up the FDR highway when Gloria looked at me, and, in the casual way she could deliver something profound, told me my job is to discover who they are.
There is something funny about getting parenting advice from a feminist icon who never had children of her own, and something very right about getting that advice in the back of a taxi.
Gloria famously loved to discover a new place by taxi, chatting with drivers and seeking the perspective that only a local could provide. She wrote about that in her memoir My Life on the Road, the book she signed for my daughters the first time I met her. When I told her their names, she lit up and started imagining out loud “the adventures of Matilda and Frankie.”
Years later, as one of the inaugural residents of her foundation, I spent many afternoons in Gloria’s living room working at the intersection of women, AI and power. One afternoon, I brought Matilda. Over hot chocolate and holiday cookies, Gloria shared her love of Louisa May Alcott. As Matilda cradled Gloria’s first edition Little Women, Gloria kept her hand over her heart. In her lap was the Christmas present my daughters had picked out for her: a yellow taxi ornament for her tree.
Seeing the world through our daughters’ eyes
Little Women was Gloria’s favorite book as a girl. A novel that shaped her world view. A book about who gets to earn, who gets to decide, who gets to want something for herself.
Stories were always important to Gloria. Facts are easy to forget, she told me. Stories stay with us. They ask us to stand in someone else’s life, imagine new worlds.
Gloria met Matilda where she was, the way she met everyone. She loved kids, and seeing her with mine I understood why. Children are philosophers. They don’t take the way things are today as destiny, they ask why it’s like this and what else it could be. Gloria did that her whole life.
To discover who my children are, I needed to borrow Gloria’s curiosity. Ask more questions, listen more closely, practice greater empathy, which she believed was a radical emotion.
If my first lesson from Gloria on motherhood was to discover who my daughters are, the second was to do the work of building a world that deserves them.
Creating a world worthy of their adventures
Gloria lived to see the cultural backlash to feminism’s achievements and the renewed celebration of the traditional wife and mother. Family, Gloria told me, is too often the birthplace of inequality. But when we talked about progress and regression, she never treated either as permanent. She told me it would be boring otherwise.
Gloria gave me permission to be mad at a world that still falls so far short of equality, but hold on to hope anyway. And her truest wish was that we keep doing the work. Activist Amy Richards, her close friend and collaborator, calls it a beautiful responsibility.
I believe Gloria’s great wish for me in the back of that taxi last December was a world that fits Matilda and Frankie, now ages 12 and 9, and everything they hope for themselves, rather than one where girls have to shrink to fit.
A few days after Gloria died, my daughters and I took a taxi to her apartment. We brought a copy of Little Women, which joined the hundreds of flowers left outside her door. Frankie wrote the note. A simple, “Thank you, Gloria.”
We chalked the sidewalk. Close to a huge heart with the words “We shall walk in your light,” Matilda drew her best taxi cab and a portrait of Gloria with her iconic aviator glasses, and Frankie sketched a book until she got it right. We read a few cards left to honor and thank Gloria. There were other mothers on the sidewalk with their daughters, and we smiled at each other and shared knowing nods.
Then we headed out, across town, into Gloria’s unfinished business, my daughters running ahead. The adventures of Matilda and Frankie.
Erin Grau is an inaugural fellow of Gloria’s Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at advancing the feminist movement and preserving Steinem’s Manhattan apartment, which has been a hub for activism for nearly 60 years.
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