A few weeks ago, my three-year-old daughter saw a picture of Gloria Steinem and called her “Grandma.”
In some ways, she wasn’t wrong.
I have been thinking about that little moment, and about what it means to grow up in a world shaped by people whose names we learn before we understand the lives behind them. Women who become part of our political imagination, whose work makes a way for us to arrive.
But Gloria also understood that feminism did not begin or end with her.
Before Gloria became a name that could carry a movement into the mainstream, she was learning from women who had already been building it. From Florynce Kennedy and Evelyn Cunningham. From Shirley Chisholm and Fannie Lou Hamer. From Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who would become her collaborator and co-founder of Ms.. From Dolores Huerta and the labor movement, where organizing meant more than having the right ideas. It meant connecting with people, listening, and building something together.
Because the history of feminism is not a story of one woman who changed everything. It is a story of women who teach one another, who build movements together, who pass knowledge from hand to hand. It is a story of people who make room for one another, who argue, who listen, who learn, and who keep going.
And it is a story that is still being written.
I think about our youngest feminists, our Solís Policy Institute Youth fellows learning to organize with and from one another. I think about my daughter, who is too young to know Gloria’s name, but is already growing up in a world shaped by the labor and the love of generations of feminists.
What will our youngest feminists inherit?
And what will they make of it?
We inherit a movement, but we don’t inherit a finished vision. We inherit the questions that remain. Who is still outside the room? Whose freedom is still being treated as someone else’s problem? What would it mean to build a future that is not organized around scarcity, punishment, and the endless demand to survive?
Some of the work will be carried by people we will never meet. Some of it will be carried by a three-year-old who sees a photograph of Gloria and recognizes her as an ancestor.
I hope she grows up knowing that the world is not finished. That she is not too young to belong to its making. That the people who came before her were not waiting for someone like her to arrive and save them. They were making a way for her to arrive and join the long arc of movement work.
That is the strange, beautiful thing about a movement. We do not get to keep it. We get to belong to it for a while.
Thank you, Gloria,
Torre, she/they
Director, Communications, Women’s Foundation California