It is in her New York living room — the very one where women from all over the world have been sitting for decades — that Gloria Steinem, aged 92, gave a rare interview: about home, books, the women’s movement, and what she wishes for little girls born in 2026.
The Open Door Policy
The legend of American feminism receives visitors at home, in the Manhattan brownstone famous for its talking circles and its door open to all. “A social justice movement is meant to include everybody,” she explains. “It’s trying to both change society and assist society. So why would you keep anybody out?” The child of an itinerant family — winters spent in a house trailer between Michigan, Florida and California — she long had no door at all. But she had books, devoured on the back seat and “indiscriminately”, up and down the shelves of the little local library: Louisa May Alcott as a hero, for “Little Women” as much as for her adult stories of the Civil War. Hence the mischievous motto she happily owns: “I love shoes and I love books, and they both take you places.”
The Dream of a Roadside Diner
From that childhood on the road she keeps an unexpected dream, confided with a smile: to run a roadside diner one day, with blue gingham curtains and bran muffins. “Diners are infinitely democratic places: truck drivers in the middle of the night, schoolchildren during the day — everybody is welcome.” As a girl in Toledo she also dreamed of becoming a tap dancer, with Shirley Temple as her model, and her dancing helped support the household — for from about the sixth grade the roles had reversed: it was she who looked after her mother. “I think that happens to lots of people in their early years,” she says simply.
A Room of One’s Own, Then a House for All
Growing up, she says, she imagined a woman couldn’t have a home until she was married with children. First came a one-room studio shared with her friend, the artist Barbara Nessim; then this house, filled over the years with objects won at auctions — an Indian granary door, elephants, books from her travels. India, precisely, is where she went after college “to get unengaged” from a promised marriage, and where she fell in love with a newly independent country “celebrating and finding itself”. Quoting Virginia Woolf’s “a room of one’s own”, she now has a precise plan: to buy the building’s top two floors so she can leave the whole house as a meeting place and refuge for women, like a suffrage-era house she once saw in London.
“Sisters, Not a Mother”
Steinem refuses the title of mother of the movement: “Movements don’t have mothers. We’re more like sisters, looking after each other, regardless of age.” From younger women she says she learns about music, novels and the politics of the moment: “We learn from difference, not sameness. Difference is a gift.” She still laughs about her first credit card, obtained with difficulty for lack of “a proper job” — then taken away after she charged all the motel bills of a farm workers’ solidarity march to the Mexican border. As for her legacy, she finally claims it: “I hope that I had an impact by listening to women and taking women seriously, in a culture that really had trained us to take men more seriously — or to attribute a woman’s seriousness to her husband or her motherhood.”
In Love With Possibility
The conversation ventures onto ground rarely covered with her: love, marriage (three years, “with a purpose”: keeping her partner from being deported), and a line she happily owns: “The greatest love of my life is possibility.” Asked who she would spend eternity with, she names her friend Wilma Mankiller, the historic Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, “who represented not just current culture but ancient culture as well”. Her advice to a 35-year-old? “Number one: don’t listen to my advice. Then — do what you love to do at least as much, and hopefully more, than what you have to do.” And her hope for little girls born in 2026: “That they can live in a world where it’s safe to be a female human being of whatever colour we are, and where it’s possible and practical to imagine being whatever you want to be — a president, a dancer, whatever it is that you feel you want.” Did she ever feel limitations herself? “Yes — but they kept moving off into the middle distance.”