There will be much written about Gloria Steinem: journalist, organizer, co-founder of Ms. magazine, political activist, and one of the most recognizable faces of the modern American women’s movement.

Here, at Black Women in the Prism, we remember something else as well. Gloria Steinem acknowledged that she learned from Black women.

She did not invent feminism for us. She did not bring Black women into the struggle for women’s freedom. Black women had been fighting at the intersections of race, gender, class, labor, family, and state power long before the modern women’s movement acquired a name, organizations, or national media attention.

Steinem came to understand that. And, importantly, she said so.

She credited Black women with helping to shape her understanding of feminism. She specifically remembered women in the National Welfare Rights Organization, radical Black feminist attorney Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, and activist and Ms. editor Margaret Sloan-Hunter among those from whom she learned. Years later, she would say plainly that she had learned feminism disproportionately from Black women. That acknowledgment matters.

The Freedom Struggle Was Also Her Classroom

The modern women’s movement did not develop apart from the Black freedom struggle. The organizing methods, language of liberation, challenges to institutional power, insistence upon bodily autonomy, and understanding that private conditions could have political causes were being confronted throughout Black organizing.

Steinem’s feminism developed alongside that struggle and with women who refused to separate racism from sexism.

One of the most important was Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Black feminist, child-welfare advocate, and community organizer who became Steinem’s early speaking partner. Together they traveled the country at a moment when the women’s movement was routinely portrayed as an enterprise of white middle-class women.

FLO

Then there was Flo Kennedy.

Lawyer. Black Power advocate. Feminist. Radical. Provocateur.

Kennedy represented Black Panthers and other radical figures and became a formidable bridge between Black liberation politics and women’s liberation. She and Steinem traveled the lecture circuit together during the 1970s. Steinem later named Kennedy specifically as one of the women who taught her.

This was not feminism observed from a distance. It was feminism encountered in relationship.

SHIRLEY

Her political relationship with Shirley Chisholm is equally important.

Steinem and Chisholm were among the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, alongside women including Fannie Lou Hamer and Bella Abzug. The organization’s original purpose explicitly confronted sexism, racism, institutional violence, and poverty.

Chisholm understood something essential about political power. She argued that if women and racial minorities organized together around their shared exclusion from power, American politics could be fundamentally transformed.

When Chisholm made her historic campaign for President in 1972, Steinem ran as a Chisholm delegate to the Democratic National Convention. At the convention, Steinem also worked within a coalition that included women’s, Black, Hispanic, and poor people’s caucuses and hoped Chisholm might become their vice-presidential candidate.

That history belongs in the story of American feminism.

ANGELA

The relationship with Angela Davis tells another part of the story.

Davis emerged from Black radicalism, communism, prison abolition, and Black Power; Steinem became the most publicly recognizable figure of American second-wave feminism. Their politics and paths were not identical. But they intersected. Over decades, a friendship developed around their shared opposition to racial and gender oppression. Scholarship examining their relationship describes it as an important example of interracial political friendship and of the connections between feminism, racial justice, and opposition to white supremacy.

That distinction is important. Solidarity does not require sameness. It requires listening. Learning. Showing up. And understanding that another person’s struggle is not peripheral to your own freedom.

Black Women Were Never Standing Outside Feminism

Steinem eventually made the point unmistakably. When people described the women’s movement as essentially white and middle-class, she objected because that telling erased the Black women who had been there from the beginning.

She named them.

Dorothy Pitman Hughes.

Florynce Kennedy.

Pauli Murray.

Aileen Hernandez.

Fannie Lou Hamer.

Shirley Chisholm.

Audre Lorde.

Eleanor Holmes Norton.

Margaret Sloan-Hunter.

Barbara Smith.

Alice Walker.

And others.

Steinem said that “the truth is, I learned feminism from Black women.”

For Black Women in the Prism, perhaps that is where our remembrance of Gloria Steinem should reside.

Not in pretending that the women’s movement was without racial conflict. It wasn’t, not in erasing the disagreements Black women had with white feminism. There were many, and they mattered, not in making a white feminist woman the center of Black women’s liberation.

But in recognizing a woman who became willing to say publicly that Black women were among her teachers.

There is dignity in acknowledging who taught you.

There is integrity in refusing to erase them once the world begins calling you the leader.

And there is something worth remembering about a life spent discovering that the struggle against sexism could never be separated from struggles against racism, poverty, and other systems that determine whose humanity is recognized and whose power is constrained.

Gloria Steinem learned from Black women. She worked beside Black women. She listened to Black women.

And she helped carry some of what they taught her into places where their names and their ideas were too often excluded.

For that, Black Women in the Prism bears witness.