SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Gloria Steinem is being remembered for a lifetime of fighting for women's rights. Of course, she died this week at the age of 92. We're going to take a look today at how her work was influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and groundwork laid by Black feminists. NPR's Debbie Elliott has more.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Gloria Steinem often linked the cause for women's liberation to the struggle for racial equality.
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GLORIA STEINEM: It is this movement that means to rescue this country from all the old and expensive patterns of sexism, racism, elitism and violence.
ELLIOTT: That's from a 1972 lecture at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Steinem saw this Civil Rights Movement as a training ground to build connections for the women's movement.
DEIDRE MALONE: When you think about civil rights and you talk about the rights of minorities in this country, it's the same issue for women.
ELLIOTT: Deidre Malone is president of the National Women's Political Caucus. It's the organization that Steinem founded 55 years ago, alongside luminaries, including civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, feminist activist Bella Abzug and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.
MALONE: I believe pulling together this very diverse group of women to start the National Women's Political Caucus was building on that civil rights platform to advance the causes of women when it comes to women having equal rights in this country. I mean, those two movements went hand in hand.
ELLIOTT: Steinem partnered with women of color, including the Black feminist Florynce Kennedy, labor leader Dolores Huerta, Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller and anti-poverty organizer Dorothy Pitman Hughes, with whom she created Ms. magazine. There's an iconic 1971 image of Hughes and Steinem, fists raised in solidarity. Here's what Steinem said in a 2024 interview at Antioch College about going on the lecture circuit with women of color.
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STEINEM: I realized that together, we got a different audience than each of us got separately and that it was very important symbolically.
ELLIOTT: Those collaborations were intentional, says Black feminist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia and UCLA.
KIMBERLE WILLIAMS CRENSHAW: Gloria was an ally, a colleague and worked closely with all of these women in all of these different phases of the movement. She was more connected with the ground-up vision of feminism than the suburban-housewife-out vision.
ELLIOTT: Crenshaw says while the media tended to portray the women's movement as an uprising of middle-class, white frustrated housewives, Steinem understood it was larger than that.
CRENSHAW: There was a broader, deeper, more race and class-inclusive feminist sensibility that was being organized on the ground.
ELLIOTT: Crenshaw is known for conceptualizing the term intersectionality, the idea that gender interacts with class and race and other structures of inequality and should be interpreted as such in the law. She says Steinem deeply influenced her.
CRENSHAW: I'm wearing a bracelet now that she gave many of us when we were last together with her in her living room, saying that we are linked, not ranked.
ELLIOTT: Steinem maintained close links with Black feminists throughout her life as she continued to search for and remedy the wrongs in American society. Crenshaw calls her multilingual across issue areas, for instance, hosting a recent gathering at her New York apartment to talk about climate change.
CRENSHAW: So there was no sort of traditional narrow, this is what feminism is about, and this is what it's not about around her table in her space and elsewhere in the world. She was a convener and an activator, and, my goodness, what a time to lose someone like that.
ELLIOTT: Debbie Elliott, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD HOUGHTEN'S "GLASSY RAIN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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