She Proved I Wasn’t Making It Up

Gloria Steinem was living proof that we grow more powerful with age — not less

I opened up my phone yesterday to see that Gloria Steinem had died, and my heart twisted in my chest. Not because her death was premature - it wasn’t - yet the grief was real. And the sad reality: we’ve lost another leader.

Then I went looking for a photo. Not one of the famous ones. One I knew I’d taken eleven and a half years ago, when I got to be in the same room with this woman who’d changed so many of our lives. There they were! Blurry, badly lit, but the memories were in full technicolor.

I was 54, and I’d landed a volunteer gig at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference — an event I’d dreamed of attending for years. When I heard Gloria Steinem was to be the keynote speaker, a thrill ran through me. Gloria came all the way down to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to speak about her writing, her work as a feminist, and what it means to age with power and grace.

She was 80 years old up on that stage, beautiful, strong, and just as articulate as ever. I remember thinking, THAT’S how I want to be in 25 years. Like the photo, the actual words she spoke that evening have blurred in my memory. I remember her, though. And the energized, empowered feelings her words evoked.

What I remember most, though, is a wondrous feeling of relief as her words washed over me.

I wasn’t making it up. This stuff I’d been telling myself - and my clients - about living ageless was real.

By the time I got to San Miguel, I was in full-on menopause, and I’d blown up my comfortable life a couple of years before. I’d left it all behind me, moving first to Portland and then all the way to Mexico, following an inner knowing I could barely name — a hum of discontent that had turned into a certainty. Something has to change. I have to go find the parts of myself I left behind.

And I had been telling my clients and other women — mostly believing it — that midlife wasn’t the beginning of the end. The uncomfortable physical and emotional changes didn’t mean something was wrong, but rather something was right. This time was a portal. Not a slow fade into invisibility, but an awakening. A doorway into our wisdom, our power, and a radiance the culture swears we lose right about the time we actually find it.

Most days I believed it. But there was a tiny part of me that questioned whether it all was just wishful thinking. Sometimes I wondered if I’d given up a perfectly good life for a feeling. For a story I’d told myself to justify the wreckage.

And then 80-year-old Gloria Steinem walked onto a stage and held the whole room in her hand, luminous, free, still a fierce warrior for every one of us — and I had my proof. Not just inspiration. Evidence. There she was. The portal led somewhere. A woman really could walk all the way through it and come out the other side more powerful, not less.

True - Gloria didn’t have to wait for menopause to access her brilliance. But the way she shone on that stage at age 80 showed me that her radiance had only grown with age, so much so that it filled that room.

She was living proof that my theory that we grow more - not less - powerful with age was true.

So when I read that she was gone this week, at 92, I felt more than the grief of losing someone who’d meant so much to so many. It was an aching knowledge that another role model for aging women would no longer be here to light the way. To remind us of how far we’ve come… and how far there is still to go.

I’m reminded of just how far we’ve already come when I think about my own mother waking up to the truth that she might have more options than she’d been shown.

I remember my mom subscribing to Ms. Magazine when it first came out in the early 70s, and how my dad scoffed at this odd feminist magazine that defied the status quo. As an adolescent, I was somewhat oblivious to the burgeoning feminist movement, but I knew my mom was boycotting unnecessary housewifely chores like ironing sheets.

I didn’t know then that Mom wasn’t even allowed to get her own credit card, and that she needed her husband’s signature if she wanted her own checking account. But, I was smart enough to see that my dad carried the purse strings… and all the power with them.

Gloria was instrumental in changing all of that, and she lived in the background of my mind as I grew into womanhood. By the time I came of age in the late 70s/early 80s, I took women’s freedom for granted. I thought it was a done deal…despite the failure of the ERA to become law as the 28th Amendment.

I thought all of that inequality for women stuff was a thing of the past. After all, hadn’t I taken my own life in my hands and flown out to California to live the way I wanted and earn my residency for college? I had worked full-time for a year to earn the money to do it. I controlled my own money. I didn’t need a man to tell me what to do! I was in charge of my own life.

Decades later, I shake my head at the naive young woman I once was. I’m watching the wage gap not close but widen. Young men brag online about assaulting women. I cringe when I see young women — our daughters, our granddaughters — argue for a return to “traditional roles,” volunteering to hand back the very ground Gloria spent sixty years taking. A convicted man in the White House who bragged about grabbing us by the pussy. Rape academies in the news.

Yeah, no. I guess we haven’t “come such a long way baby” after all.

This was a big part of the grief I sat with yesterday...that sense of futility in knowing that these champions of women’s rights, like Gloria, have to watch it all come round again as they age out.

And then I remembered what she’d want from us. Everything old is new again — and Gloria, bless her, might have decided this was a good time to check out. But she didn’t leave us empty-handed.

She’s passing that torch on. To us, especially those of us at midlife and beyond, who remember the conditions women lived with and that women like Gloria worked so tirelessly to change.

We are all continuing to evolve; I know I am. And we are all finding our own unique gifts and the ways we can carry this torch.

I spent several years of my coaching practice helping midlife women lose weight, without all the extreme dieting. It seemed like good work, helping people get healthier. But, an uncomfortable knowing began to grow inside of me. I was subtly perpetuating the exact opposite of what I truly believed in.

I wanted to empower women, give them the courage to live as their true selves. To unleash their brilliance. But all this focus on the scale, the mirror, the pants that don’t fit anymore — these weren’t the problems worthy of our energy. This obsession with being a certain size was just one more cage, no different than the people-pleasing, the perfectionism and the mean-girl inner critic I’ve written a whole book about. It’s yet another way we make ourselves small and call it self-improvement.

Because here’s what Gloria confirmed for me in that conference hall, and what her death has me refusing to forget:

The portal is real. I’ve walked far enough through it now to stop wondering. It’s not always the most comfortable walk, and we have to leave so many old ways and beliefs behind… but the wisdom that awaits is worth that pain.

Gloria was one of the great ones holding the torch, and now she’s gone — which means the rest of us are the ones who must wave it. Out loud. In our radiant, powerful, unabandoned, gloriously aging bodies.

Rest in power, Gloria. We’ve got it from here.