Let's write about the late and great feminist Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem: Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92. Ms. Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her. Born in Ohio in 1934, Steinem grew up in a trailer home. Her mother’s mental illness left her struggling to hold on to work and in and out of sanatoriums. When she was 10, her parents separated and, while growing up in a rundown home in Toledo with her mother, Steinem began to notice the hostility her mother endured as a working woman.  After graduating from a women’s liberal arts college in 1956, Steinem travelled to India for two years, where she worked as a legal clerk in the country’s supreme court. Returning to the US, she worked as the director of the Independent Research Service, a CIA front that recruited American students to disrupt the Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki. Steinem later revealed she had always known who was bankrolling the operation: “If I had a choice I would do it again.” (The Guardian)

Eulogy by Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP:  The View from Maine September 4, 2026
Not Ideology — Epidemiology:  Published on Facebook

Women's standing and women's survival rise and fall together.

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and I have been thinking about how to explain to my children's generation what the world looked like when I was a girl growing up in rural Maine, and how much of the distance between that world and theirs runs through her life's work.

When I was born, a woman in Maine (or the U.S.) could not reliably get a credit card or a loan without a husband's or father's signature. She could be fired for becoming pregnant, and often was. If her husband beat her, there was no shelter to go to, no protection order to seek, and little language even to name what was happening. The term "domestic violence" had not yet entered public life. Contraception was not yet a settled legal right. Medical school classes were more than ninety percent men, and the few women admitted were routinely asked why they were taking a seat from a man. None of this was ancient history. All of it was within my lifetime.
Steinem did not change these things single-handedly. No one does. But she was, for half a century, the movement's most tireless organizer and its clearest voice. 

Ms. Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus, testified for the Equal Rights Amendment, and insisted that the things happening privately to women - in their marriages, their doctors' offices, their workplaces - were public questions deserving public answers. That insistence is, at its core, a public health idea. It is the same idea that built our field: that patterns of suffering are not fate, and that naming them is the first step to changing them.

The public health consequences have been profound. The CDC counts family planning among the ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century, because when women can decide whether and when to have children, mothers and babies live. Domestic violence moved from a private shame to a recognized cause of injury and death that our hospitals now screen for and many communities now shelter against. And the professions changed: women today make up more than half of American medical students. My own career - medical school, country doctoring, fifteen years as Maine's state health officer - was built on doors that were pried open in the 1960s and 70s, most of them by women I never met. So was my sister's: Maine, which had never elected a woman governor in its first two centuries, has now done so. And so, I hope, will my daughter's, as she trains for medicine in rural Maine.
If you want to know what the world looks like without those changes, you do not have to imagine it. You can read the data. Around the world, a woman still dies about every two minutes from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, deaths that are overwhelmingly preventable, and overwhelmingly concentrated in places where girls leave school early, marry as children, and cannot decide the timing of their own pregnancies. In the countries where women's rights are weakest, a woman's lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is more than a hundred times higher than in countries where those rights are strong. The correlation is not a coincidence. Women's standing and women's survival rise and fall together. That is not ideology; it is epidemiology.

The lesson of her century is that these gains were made, not given, and they are kept the same way. Gloria Steinem liked to say that she planned to live to 100, and she nearly did. The best way I know to honor the years she gave us is to spend our own the same way: paying attention, telling the truth about what the data show, and refusing to accept that any mother's death is simply the way things are.