Gloria Steinem at a Women’s Action Alliance news conference on Jan. 12, 1972.
(Photo by Warren K. Leffler/U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress)

This Week’s Poem
I missed my chance to meet Gloria Steinem in 1989. She was set to speak at a small Christian college in the Midwest where I was teaching English. But at the last minute, Steinem couldn’t make it, and we were left listening to a talk by Phyllis Schlafly. (Sometimes the satire writes itself.)

Kim Dower, the author of six poetry collections, had better luck. She sent me this poem, which she started writing on Sept. 2, the day the feminist activist died.
 

Gloria Steinem, 1972, Emerson College, Boston

She was who we girls wanted to be
All of us scrappy hippies in flannel
Standing shoulder to shoulder in the gym

I can still smell the thick fragrance of excitement
Watching her up there, her gorgeous hair
Aviator glasses we all wanted to wear, her long

Fingers pointing as she and Bill Baird (who cares)
Held up posters of different types of birth control:
Diaphragm, IUD, words I’d never heard

Me, having swallowed “The Pill” since puberty
I was one of the lucky ones unlike Melissa or Lori
Had to scrape up the money and fly to Puerto Rico

I can still remember the joyful heat of emotion, Gloria
Mod Squad tall, giving us Voice, permission to be heard
Holding our hands with words I’ve cherished forever

Our fragile 19-year-old selves changed in an instant
She was the first and only to ever tell us we were not
Pieces of shit in a bloated male world, or words to that

Effect, we could make a difference, we could speak up
We could be feminists, the new word, the word
I wore like over-sized golden hoop earrings

That long weekend visit home, as I swaggered
Into my mother’s kitchen, Gloria’s voice in my head
Saying The Word at dinner while my mother

Looked away, scared to hear, but wanted
With all her heart to join this new world
Her daughter brought home to her.

Kim Dower’s most recent collection, “What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria,” will be published in paperback in January (Red Hen Press). She’s currently working on a book called “The Party Cake Building” about growing up in the ’60s on the Upper West Side.◆

© 2026 Ron Charles

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