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I was a 33-year-old organizer when I first met Gloria Steinem in 2007. Despite being a women’s studies major in college, I had not fully grasped Gloria’s role in supporting grassroots women’s organizations. She had created the Ms. Foundation for Women to do just that, to fund and amplify women’s organizing, like the work I was doing with domestic workers in New York. Meeting her at their annual fundraising gala, I was moved by how kind, warm, and genuinely excited she was to learn about and support our efforts.
“Do you know about Carolyn Reed?” she asked me.
Reed founded the Household Technicians of America in 1971. Her organizing, along with the work of Dorothy Bolden and the National Domestic Workers Union in the South, catalyzed the inclusion of domestic workers in federal minimum wage laws after 40 years of exclusion from Roosevelt’s New Deal.
I had never heard of Carolyn Reed or Dorothy Bolden. None of my women’s history classes had taught me about these two Black women who helped pave the way before me. But Gloria knew Ms. Reed well; she frequently enlisted Gloria in domestic workers’ efforts to gain respect and recognition as professionals.
At the time, together with organizers from around the country, I was planning what would become the founding meeting of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Gloria’s prompt helped us find our roots in the legacy of Black domestic workers organizing and leadership throughout the country, whose bravery has made our economy better for women generation after generation, a legacy our organization was founded to carry forward.
This is who Gloria was. She recognized value and power where others didn’t. She corrected the omissions that kept us from finding one another.
A year after we met, I reached out to Gloria to let her know that we were at an important point in our efforts to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, the first comprehensive state-level legislation to extend labor rights to domestic workers, including new protections such as paid leave. We were planning a 24-hour vigil in front of the governor’s office. We communicated by email; she formatted her emails like letters, with all the accompanying formalities and indentations.
“Dear Ai-jen,
Ok, I’ll see you there.
Love, Gloria.”
We were five years into our campaign. Dozens of domestic workers had taken time away from work and sacrificed their wages to hold vigil. When Gloria arrived, she joined our circle on the sidewalk across from the governor’s office, listened to everyone’s stories, and when it was her turn to speak on our little red and white battery-operated bullhorn, she spoke of Carolyn Reed, how she was applauding our campaign from heaven, and would be walking alongside us on our march to victory.
This was the beginning of a long friendship and mentorship. But Gloria’s specific form of mentorship included listening and sharing what she learned from other women, curated by her strategic mind and communicated with her unparalleled way with words. She did not give advice; she shared stories. She never saw herself as a mentor, as much as she felt mentored by others, always learning from the women she met, especially younger women.
Gloria identified as an organizer more than an activist, because organizers re-organize relations of power to be more equal, and put power in the hands of everyday people. When I told her we were experimenting with neighborhood-based organizing circles to reach more domestic workers, she told me that previous movements of women gathered in circles of 13—small enough that everyone felt seen and heard, but large enough to feel the power of the collective.
Like any good organizer, Gloria appreciated the chance to roll up her sleeves: she wrote letters to governors to help us get across the finish line in our legislative campaigns and called mayors to ensure that domestic workers would not be excluded from paid sick days legislation. If she was invited to speak at a press conference related to labor legislation, she would check with me to see how the bill impacted domestic workers.
Several years into our friendship, I found her essay “Revaluing Economics” in Moving Beyond Words. Published in 1994—years before the National Domestic Workers Alliance was even the germ of an idea—she wrote about care as an essential resource that our economic model has never adequately valued, in no small part because of its association with women. She argued that if we are to not only survive but thrive in the future, we must fundamentally protect and revalue care. The last 15 years of my work have been deeply shaped by these ideas.
More recently, I spent much of my time with Gloria through an intergenerational, multi-racial circle of women who affectionately call ourselves the “G Squad”—composed of a writer, two artists, a pro-democracy organizer, me, and Gloria. We gathered over the years to celebrate Gloria’s birthday, to strategize big moments in the women’s movement, or vet a new love interest in the mix. We learned about Gloria’s life and adventures from one another, and we learned about other women through Gloria.
Much has been shared about the talking circles Gloria hosted in her home, but Gloria was part of dozens of ongoing circles of relationships with women like ours around the world. I wondered how she had the time for so many, including us. She was one of the first people to send me a note when she learned I would be joining the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to know that your understanding and way of organizing will be there—you who don’t hold a finger to the wind, but become the wind,” Gloria wrote. “It also makes me feel a little better about the way too early loss of Wilma.”
She was referring to her close friend and former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, who died of cancer with Gloria at her side. Wilma was a legendary organizer and leader who also served as a trustee of the Ford Foundation. Gloria urged me to read Wilma’s speech, Context Is Everything.
Gloria changed the context for women like me, our choices and our understanding of them. It was as if she lived on a different time and space continuum, one composed of circles of women throughout history, all “linked, not ranked.”
Her true gift was helping so many of us see the hidden stories, ideas, lives, and contributions of women. She helped us locate our place in the story. In this world sorted by hierarchies of human value, at a moment when too many of our stories are being erased, may her memory be a reminder that we are not alone in the world or in history.
We are part of a proud and vast legacy of women, seen and unseen, that continues to change the world. And that is exactly what Gloria would have wanted.
