Famed feminist Gloria Steinem died last month at age 92. She was immediately lionized by the left as the defining champion of women's rights. An honest accounting of her legacy, however, demands a harder look. The movement she helped shape did not end with women being stronger — it ended with men taking their scholarships, their championships, and their locker rooms.
Steinem and her feminist contemporaries radically departed from earlier champions of suffrage and women’s rights, many of whom wanted to raise the standard for men, not lower it for women. They opposed abortion as a get-out-of-jail-free card for men who didn’t want to be morally accountable.
Steinem's vision turned their vision entirely upside down. Her famous line — that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle — captured the spirit of the movement she led. This renewed feminism was not about calling men to moral responsibility, but about freeing women from theirs. Women should have the same sexual autonomy, the same freedom from consequences, and the same absolution that men had too long enjoyed. Abortion was not merely accepted in this framework. It became the essential defining characteristic of it.
That logic collapses on itself. Once you detach womanhood from any essential meaning and insist that men and women are simply interchangeable in every role, you have no ground left to stand on when men decide to identify as women. The latest wave of feminism has not betrayed but fulfilled Steinem's vision. Men appropriating female identity, demanding access to women's spaces and victim status, claiming championships and scholarships women trained for — none of this could have happened if feminism had stayed grounded in the truth of what it means to be a woman.
Phyllis Schlafly saw it coming. She spent decades opposing the ERA and the cultural revolution Steinem championed, and she was right on every count. Phyllis won the ERA battle, the amendment never becoming law. And the instincts that drove her victory — that men and women are different by design and those differences are worth protecting — are the same instincts now fueling the pushback against transgender anti-woman ideology.
Gloria Steinem spent her life claiming to protect women but succeeded only in nearly ending womanhood. The good news is that the truth she rejected has not gone away, and neither have its defenders following in Phyllis Schlafly’s footsteps.
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