I have been feeling an unexpected amount of grief over the deaths, just days apart, of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan.
Perhaps the grief is partly generational. These women’s voices were part of the landscape of my young adulthood. They helped create the feminist movement that shaped the way I came to understand myself, my work, and the world.
But my grief for Robin Morgan is especially personal. When I was in my twenties, I read Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. I don’t remember every argument in the book now, but I remember what it felt like to read it. Morgan was giving language to experiences and ideas I was only beginning to understand. She wasn’t asking permission or making feminism comfortable. She was challenging assumptions about all sorts of things — women’s lives, sexuality, power, anger, work, all the ways women, and men, had been taught to see themselves.
That mattered to me. It helped form me as a feminist. And that is one reason her death has made me think about something beyond the understandable outpouring of tributes: What happens to the intellectual history of feminism when the women who created it are gone?
Robin Morgan was so much more than the author of Going Too Far. She was a poet, writer, editor, organizer and activist. As her son, Blake, said in an email I received this morning, “First and foremost, she was an artist. Her art fueled her politics, fueled her feminism, fueled the way she raised me. She taught me that how one does anything is how one does everything—that the personal is political, and that as she once wrote, ‘Hate generalizes, love specifies.'”
Robin Morgan’s attention to popular culture — her willingness to question big social events like the Miss America pageant of 1968 (the year I was born she was already making big waves!) made her one of the defining strategists of second-wave feminism. She went on to write more than twenty books and to co-found the Women’s Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda.
Gloria Steinem’s public legacy is perhaps more secure. For decades, she was one of the most recognizable faces of the women’s movement. She co-founded Ms. Magazine and helped build vital organizations including the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Ms. Foundation for Women. She continued working, organizing, writing and mentoring into her nineties. Just a few months ago, my Facebook feed was spilling over with pictures of her at her most recent birthday party, surrounded by so many women who had benefited from her guidance, support, and courage.
And yet even Steinem’s extraordinary visibility makes me wonder about what happens next. We tend to think of history as something that simply survives because it was important. But actually, it doesn’t work that way.
History survives because someone saves the papers, maintains the archives, keeps the books in print, funds the institutions, records the oral histories, teaches the work, digitizes the photographs, supports the scholars and makes sure that another generation can actually find what came before.
The world is far more likely to remember John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates, and other names that are enshrined into our very architecture, names spoken to refer to buildings, streets, parks, libraries, and other places of import across the nation. The world is far less likely to remember Gloria Steinem, and to an even greater degree, Robin Morgan.
This is where I find myself thinking about philanthropy.
There is something striking about the difference between the way we preserve the legacies of many male political and social leaders and the way feminist history has often been preserved. I’m not arguing that feminists have received no philanthropic support, or that the accomplishments of Steinem and Morgan will simply disappear. They won’t.
But feminist history has too often depended upon women themselves, and upon underfunded organizations, to carry the enormous task of remembering.
This isn’t only about Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. It is about the thousands of women whose intellectual and organizing work changed American life but whose names are not easy to find.
And there is another irony here. Feminists spent decades insisting that women’s lives and experiences were worthy of historical attention. We taught ourselves to ask, Where are the women in history? Who has been left out? Whose stories were considered important enough to preserve?
We should ask the same questions about ourselves.
I don’t want to end this by suggesting that the answer is simply more money, although money matters enormously. I think the deeper question is whether we believe feminist history is part of the permanent intellectual and cultural history of this country. If we do, then we need to act accordingly.
We need to preserve feminist archives and support feminist scholarship. We need to fund organizations whose work includes documenting movement history. We need to record the stories of women who participated in earlier generations of activism before those memories are lost. This was one of the reasons I felt compelled to start Philanthropy Women. Because women’s work, and particularly women’s work to lift up and make equal women’s lives, is just so damn important. And yet it gets so little fanfare.
Someone like Robin Morgan can change a young woman’s life without ever knowing it. I am one of those women, and this is what great feminist writing can do. It can reach across decades and speaks to another woman: You are not imagining this. You are not alone. There is another way to understand what is happening to you and to others in this world.
That is a legacy worth preserving, and offering deep gratitude for.
So I want to say thank you, Robin Morgan, for the words that helped shape me.
Thank you, Gloria Steinem, for the enormous work of making feminism visible, public, and possible for generations of women.
And thank you to both of you for leaving behind something more valuable than your individual reputations: a body of ideas and the formation of new institutions that others can carry forward.
May we be good enough custodians of the great legacies of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan.
And may we remember that preserving women’s history is not an act of nostalgia. It is an investment in the world, and the women, to come.
