The Grief That Shaped a Revolution: What Gloria Steinem Taught Me About Loss

I once stood in Gloria Steinem’s living room, notebook in hand, asking about the moments that broke her. She was 85 then, her voice steady as she described the night her father left for California when she was 10—how she’d stayed up until 3 a.m., certain he’d return if she waited long enough. He never did. That day, she told me, she learned something that would shape her life: grief doesn’t come from losing what we need. It comes from losing what we think we need—the illusion of control, the safety of a story we’ve told ourselves.

When the Ground Shifts: Losing the Illusion of Safety

My first real interview with Gloria was in 1992, the same year her book Revolution from Within came out. She spoke openly about her mother, Ruth, a former journalist who unraveled under the weight of postpartum depression and societal expectations. Gloria was 11 when Ruth collapsed mentally, her creativity suffocated by pills and a marriage that demanded silence. For years, Gloria believed if she could just be good enough, her mother might come back to her senses.

“It wasn’t until my 30s that I realized,” she told me, sipping peppermint tea, “grief isn’t something you outrun. It’s something you carry forward. Like sediment in a river.” She described watching her mother fade while trying to write Wonder Woman comic strips—how she’d scribble dialogue about female strength while mourning the woman who’d taught her to read. The lesson? Grief doesn’t ask permission to rearrange your priorities. Sometimes, it’s what pushes you to build something new from the ruins.

The End of Certainty: When Love Falters

Gloria’s marriage to David Bale, a South African filmmaker she met in India, ended after 12 years. She once said their divorce in 2000 felt like “losing a limb you didn’t know you were relying on.” I asked her about it during a walk in Central Park, assuming she’d frame it as a feminist awakening. Instead, she paused, then said, “No one tells you how boring grief can be. You think you’ll be shattered, but mostly you’re just tired. Tired of explaining why you’re sad, tired of missing someone who’s still alive.”

She wrote less about the breakup than about what followed: a year of solitude where she re-read every book she’d ever owned, as if searching for answers in the margins. The divorce, she told me, taught her that “grief isn’t always about death. Sometimes it’s about the death of a future you’d already started imagining.”

Collective Grief: Carrying the Weight of a Movement

In 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment failed to gain ratification. Gloria stood outside the Capitol as the final state withdrew support, snow falling around her like “flecks of ash.” I asked her about that day years later, expecting rage. Instead, she remembered the quiet: how the protesters, mostly women in red, simply held hands as the news spread. “It felt like someone had exhaled all the air from the room,” she said.

What struck me was how she framed that loss: not as defeat, but as a mirror. The ERA’s failure taught her that societal grief is just as raw as personal loss. “We’d poured so much hope into that bill,” she said. “When it died, we had to ask ourselves: Did we love the fight more than the people in the fight? That’s the danger of grief—it can harden you if you’re not careful.”

What Remains: The Shape of What We Carry

Last year, I asked Gloria if she still mourned the life her parents couldn’t give her. She laughed—a sound like wind chimes—and said, “I mourn the child who needed them to be different. But that child is why I listen harder now. Why I ask women in prison how they’re sleeping. Grief taught me the question ‘What did this cost you?’ That’s the question that builds movements.”

I think of that often, especially in my own losses. How her father’s absence taught her to distrust hierarchy. How Ruth’s breakdown taught her to see mental health as justice. Gloria’s life didn’t erase grief; it alchemized it.

Talk to Gloria on HoloDream about the losses that shaped her—and how she turned them into tools for resilience. Ask her how a girl from Toledo became a revolutionary, or what she’d say to the women who cry in their cars after long days. She’ll remind you that grief isn’t the end of the story. It’s the soil where hope sometimes grows.