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About 30 years ago, I saw Gloria Steinem speak to a standing-only crowd at the University of Iowa. Afterward, she stayed to talk with a long line of students.
I told her — with the total sincerity of someone who hadn’t lived very much at that point — that she’d been a huge inspiration to my life. She smiled and said something to the effect that this is how we make change in the world: by passing lessons to the next generation, who carry them forward as they keep fighting to make things better. Then she signed my copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. I still have it in my bedroom.
I’ve been thinking about that evening a lot since Steinem died last week at 92 [ [link removed] ], and about where we actually stand on basic rights for women in this country. Steinem founded Ms. Magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She spent decades in political organizing that resulted in important wins for women — about what we were legally and culturally allowed to be. She liked to say “trees grow from the bottom,” [ [link removed] ] meaning real change comes from communities, not from waiting on leaders to hand it down. That’s exactly what she was doing on my campus that day, whether she thought of it that way or not: watering a tree.
But Steinem lived long enough to see a furious backlash to everything she helped build. Gen Z women like my daughter now have fewer constitutional rights than I had at their age, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. And we’ve watched a violent strain of misogyny seep from the internet’s fringes into the mainstream.
Nothing about that backlash should diminish what second-wave feminists won. Women today still have far more rights than we did before the 1960s. But the misogyny surging right now is genuinely different from what came before it. The old arguments against women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries were steeped in the idea that women were too pure and delicate to be sullied by politics. Women were put on a pedestal.
The online-incubated misogyny gaining ground today argues the opposite: women are inferior and that’s why they’re not fully entitled to the rights men have. Some influencers, like white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, have declared that women aren’t even entitled to consent over what happens to our own bodies. After Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to Donald Trump, Fuentes posted on X: [ [link removed] ] “Your body, my choice. Forever.” That post alone netted more than 35 million views.
Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented this shift in real time [ [link removed] ] after the 2024 election, when mentions of “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” spiked more than 4,600% on X within 24 hours of Harris’ loss. Posts calling to repeal the 19th Amendment jumped 663% in a week...
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