4 min readSep 9, 2026 08:27 AM IST
First published on: Sep 9, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST
Gloria Steinem’s greatest contribution to one of humanity’s most vital and noble projects is that she called out injustices and kindled the fires of discontents. Most importantly, she gave us reason to make it into a global public good, not a partisan project, when she defined a feminist as one who recognises the equality and humanity of both women and men. She helped generations of women see patriarchy for what it is, to name it and challenge it. When I entered Lady Shri Ram College in 1970, second-wave feminism was in ferment. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch were unsettling inherited certainties. My generation of Indian women with feminist parents were assimilating these ideas and beginning to embody them.
In my chapter on feminism in Delhi University, Celebrating 100 Glorious Years (2022), I described “the three streams of feminism — liberal or mainstream feminism calling for more thorough integration of women into male-dominated power structures everywhere, radical liberalism calling for revolutionary revamping of society itself along with non-hierarchical and equitable reordering of organisation and politics and even the cultural or difference feminism which advocated valuing the distinct qualities of women”. My parents defined their feminism as the Hindu belief in nari shakti, the Tridevis and Ardhanarishwar. They never made us feel secondary, and my father presented me with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on my 15th birthday. Yet the one personality who fired my imagination the most was Steinem.
Her writings, speeches and clarion call to wage “a million mutinies every day in every way to assert their equal rights” made us brave — in our homes, in the university and in the wider world. Steinem showed how patriarchy had been normalised until inequality could masquerade as tradition. She helped women name structural discrimination, violence, unequal pay, political exclusion and denial of reproductive freedom. Bodily autonomy was foundational.
Serendipitously, India had entered Steinem’s life before she entered mine. She came to India on a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship, lived at Miranda House and travelled widely. Encounters with Gandhians and Indian women activists became part of her intellectual formation. India travelled into Steinem; years later, she travelled back to India through her ideas.
Yet Indian feminism was never merely a Western transplant. Alongside Beauvoir and Steinem stood Ahilyabai Holkar, Rani Lakshmibai, Savitribai Phule, Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and the legion of Indian women activists who led the Global South’s nari shakti movements.
Four decades after LSR, life completed an extraordinary circle. As founding deputy executive director of UN Women, I spent seven years helping build up the UN’s first consolidated global entity dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment. Steinem strongly supported UN Women. She became almost a presiding spirit — a source of inspiration, validation, guidance and solidarity. I worked alongside my icon in our “Mission Possible” of gender equality and got to know her. I remember visiting her New York home, steeped in Indian art, artefacts and colours of sisterhood across continents. Inspired by her 1972 cover of Ms. magazine of a multi-armed multitasking Kali, I spoke to her about going beyond provoking outrage to weaponising good traditions that empower women in religion, culture and civilisational values.
Steinem lived long enough to see astonishing advances — and fierce reversals. Bodily autonomy is again contested, misogyny has acquired new megaphones and patriarchy has proved disturbingly inventive. Yet backlash cannot erase breakthroughs. Her place in history — and in the “herstory” she helped script — is undeniable. The fierce winds may buffet the flame she lit, but not extinguish it. It burns now in movements, institutions, laws and generations of women carrying the Mission Possible forward.
The writer is former assistant secretary general, United Nations, and former deputy executive director, UN Women
Gloria Steinem at a women's conference held at the LBJ Library in 1975. (Wikimedia Commons) 
Share
