Maryland NOW joins feminists across the country and around the world in mourning the death of Gloria Steinem, whose writing, organizing and activism helped transform the lives of generations of women.

For more than six decades, Gloria helped change not only what Americans thought about women’s equality, but what we were willing to talk about at all.

As a young journalist, she confronted a profession in which women were routinely relegated to “women’s pages” and denied serious assignments. Her groundbreaking reporting exposed the exploitation of women working in Playboy Clubs and challenged the narrow choices society imposed on women between family, independence and professional ambition.

But journalism was only one part of her work.

Gloria helped build the institutions that turned the modern women’s movement into lasting political and cultural power. She co-founded Ms. magazine, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Action Alliance and the Ms. Foundation for Women, and spent decades organizing for reproductive freedom, the Equal Rights Amendment, economic equality, an end to violence against women and women’s full participation in political life.

She also understood that feminism could never belong to one woman, one generation or one group of women.

Although the media often tried to make Gloria the singular face of the women’s movement, she repeatedly directed attention toward the women who organized alongside her and those whose work had too often been erased from its history. She credited women including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Florynce Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pauli Murray and Shirley Chisholm with teaching and inspiring her.

Gloria understood that movements are built collectively and passed from generation to generation.

That may be among the most important parts of her legacy.

The world Gloria entered as a young woman was profoundly different from the one she leaves behind. Women who were once excluded from institutions of power now lead them. Issues once dismissed as private matters or simply “the way things are” became matters of public policy, civil rights and law.

That transformation did not happen naturally. Women organized for it.

And the work remains unfinished.

The Equal Rights Amendment Gloria spent decades championing remains at the center of our work. Reproductive freedom is again being contested across the country. Women continue to confront violence, economic inequality and discrimination. LGBTQIA+ people face renewed attacks on their rights and dignity. Women and girls still live with inequalities that earlier generations of feminists fought to expose.

Gloria once rejected the idea that there was a single feminist torch that she would someday hand to a successor. Her vision was much bigger: one torch lighting another, and another, until there was more light everywhere.

Maryland NOW is part of that light.