Naomi Weisman is a Canadian-Australian and mother of three who loves to Ramble with her dog, cook for family and friends, and laugh whenever possible.
When I was a teenager in the 1980s, declaring yourself a feminist was both a badge of honour and a source of angst.
There was still plenty of talk about “bra-burners,” and being a feminist could set you apart a little. It could mean being seen as the kind of girl who didn’t completely fall in line with her peers—or with what boys might want girls to be.
That was complicated when you were a teenager and, like most teenagers, still wanted to fit in.
I was fortunate to have a good friend who introduced me to feminist writers. I also had the influence of my mother, who was living what I would now describe as a very feminist life. Between the two, I started developing some fairly strong beliefs of my own about what it meant for women to have an equal place in society.
I was also beginning to understand that being objectified by men wasn’t something I wanted to aspire to, even though there were plenty of messages around me suggesting otherwise.
There weren’t a lot of mainstream women to look to for guidance on any of this.
Gloria Steinem was one of them.
In fact, when I think about what the word feminist meant to me then—and even what it means to me now—I realize that Gloria Steinem herself helped define it. Not just through what she said or wrote, but through the life she lived and the things she accomplished. Her image became entwined with the idea of feminism itself. She didn’t simply advocate for a movement; for many of us, she helped show us what that movement looked like.
That is a rare thing when you think about it. Very few people become so closely associated with an idea that they actually help us understand what the word itself means.
There was another contradiction about Gloria Steinem that fascinated me, particularly as a teenager.
She was objectively beautiful. She was glamorous and sexy. She was also funny. And somehow, all of that sat alongside this image of the supposedly militant feminist that people liked to warn us about.
I loved the irony of that.
At a time when feminists were often caricatured as angry, humourless “bra-burners” who rejected femininity—and when girls like me could worry that calling ourselves feminists meant rejecting those things too—there was Gloria Steinem. She didn’t fit the stereotype at all.
Maybe that was part of her power. She made it harder to put feminism into a tidy little box. She could be beautiful without making her beauty the source of her worth. She could be feminine without allowing femininity to define her. She could be sexy and still insist that being objectified was something entirely different.
I think, as a teenage girl, I needed to see that too.
I remember being struck by how well-spoken she was. She could take something I felt instinctively and explain why it mattered. She gave language to ideas I hadn’t yet figured out how to articulate for myself.
By the time I discovered her, of course, Steinem had already been doing this for years. She had become one of the most recognizable voices of the women’s movement, co-founded Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus, and written extensively about equality, discrimination, abortion, politics, and the representation of women in the media.
It’s easy to forget now how different the landscape was for girls growing up then.
There was no internet. No social media. No endless supply of podcasts where women could talk openly about their lives and experiences. There certainly weren’t thousands of female voices at our fingertips offering different versions of what it might mean to be a woman.
You found the women you found.
And Gloria Steinem was one of the women I found.
Years later, she found her way back to me.
I was listening to Wiser Than Me, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s wonderful podcast in which she interviews older and wiser women about their lives and what they’ve learned along the way. One of her guests was Gloria Steinem, then 90 years old.
I couldn’t wait to listen.
And she blew me away for about the millionth time.
I think what surprised me was how much I still wanted to hear what she had to say. Here I was, decades removed from that teenage girl trying to figure out what feminism meant to her, and Gloria Steinem was still making me think.
Only now, the conversation was also about getting older.
At one point, Louis-Dreyfus asked Steinem what age she felt inside. Steinem talked about 50 as the age when she felt she had really “gelled.”
I loved that.
I’m 58 now, and there was something about hearing a 90-year-old woman talk about 50 that really stayed with me.
We hear so much about what women lose as we age. Youth. Beauty. Visibility. Relevance. There is an entire industry devoted to helping us look as though it isn’t happening.
And yet here was this woman, at 90, as interesting and engaged as ever, talking about 50 as an arrival rather than a departure.
Maybe that is why Gloria Steinem has meant something different to me at different stages of my life.
As a teenager, I needed women who could help me understand that equality wasn’t about rejecting femininity or disliking men. It was about having choices. It was about being taken seriously. It was about deciding for yourself what kind of woman you wanted to be.
Now I find myself interested in a slightly different question: What kind of older woman do I want to be?
I want to hear from women who have already travelled a little farther down this road. What have you learned at 60? What changed at 70? What stopped mattering at 80? What, unexpectedly, became more important?
That’s one of the reasons I loved hearing Gloria Steinem at 90.
She didn’t sound like someone whose most interesting years were behind her.
Gloria Steinem died on September 2, 2026, at the age of 92. She spent more than six decades writing, organizing, and speaking about women’s equality, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
When I heard that she had died, I found myself thinking about who I was as a teenager in the 1980s.
I was trying to figure out whether calling myself a feminist would make me different.
It did.
I’m very glad it did.
And I’m grateful there were women like Gloria Steinem around to show me that being different wasn’t necessarily something to worry about.
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