Long before white women had a word for it, Black women were already living out feminism’s core belief: that inequality, in any form, was worth fighting. It’s a point Gloria Steinem returned to again and again across decades of speeches and interviews — and it’s worth remembering now that she’s gone.
Steinem, the pioneering journalist and activist, died September 2 in New York City. She was 92. She spent her career advancing women’s equality and building a national movement, but she also acknowledged that the movement’s real origin story ran through Black women, not around them.
“The problem, and what [many feminists today] are not saying is that women of color in general — and especially Black women — have always been more likely to be feminist than white women,” Steinem said during a women’s conference in Boston in 2022. “And the problem I have with the idea that the women’s movement or the feminist movement is somehow a white thing is that it renders invisible the people who have always been there.”
Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, helped launch the National Women’s Political Caucus and put her boots on the ground, spending decades fighting for reproductive freedom and economic independence for women.
But Steinem’s legacy also included a point that cannot, and should not, be ignored: the history of feminism can’t be told honestly without Black women at its core.
Steinem often argued that Black women had historically been far more likely than white women to support feminist causes, according to Interview magazine. She pointed to the first national public-opinion polling on women’s issues in the early 1970s comparing Black women’s support of the feminist movement versus white women. And the results were staggering.
When Ms. magazine published the poll in 1972, it found that over 60% of Black women said they supported feminist issues. For white women? Only 30%.
Steinem attributed part of that difference to Black women’s experiences with racial discrimination and their greater participation in the workforce, arguing that experiencing one form of inequality could make women more likely to recognize another.
She also pushed back against the idea that feminism was simply a white, middle-class movement, saying that framing “renders invisible” the Black women who were there from the beginning, like members of the National Black Feminist Organization.
In interviews, she was just as bold and courageous about the not-so-fine-line between race, gender and feminism. She once recalled how she had “learned feminism disproportionately from Black women”— specifically naming women in the National Welfare Rights Organization and feminist activist Flo Kennedy among those who helped shape her thinking, and she noted the Black women who brought landmark sexual-harassment cases. (Three Black women filed sexual harassment lawsuits in 1974: two against the federal government, filed by Paulette Barnes and Diane Williams, and one against a bank, filed by Mechelle Vinson. All three cases succeeded.)
And decades later, another Black woman would put two simple words on a movement that would shake the world, “me too.” Long before Harvey Weinstein’s 2017 scandal sent #MeToo viral, Black activist Tarana Burke had created the movement in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black girls and women. When allegations against Weinstein exploded in 2017 and the hashtag spread globally, Burke’s years of grassroots work became the foundation of a worldwide, unstoppable reckoning.
In today’s social and political climate, not much has changed, Steinem once explained. Back in 2017, she pointed out that white women overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, while on the other hand, the majority of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton. Why such a vast difference?
According to Steinem, married white women voted “in the interests of their husbands’ income and identity, because that’s what they’re dependent on,” according to Quartz. However, for women of color, they are blatantly aware of systemic biases in their everyday lives, and because of that, they are far more likely to actively oppose oppression.
“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” a Instagram post from her foundation announcing her death read. She “lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the post continued, praising how she used her own living room as a “center for social justice movements.”
