09/03/2026
Gloria Steinem died yesterday at 92. If you’re in vet med and haven’t heard her name outside a poli-sci class, here’s the short version.
She started as a journalist, went undercover in the Pl***oy Club in the 60s to expose how it actually treated women, and never really stopped after that. Co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1972 when almost no mainstream outlet would run stories about equal pay or reproductive rights without a punchline attached. Co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. Spent the next five decades on the road, at rallies, on campuses, in rooms where she wasn’t wanted, arguing that women’s rights are human rights and saying it before it was a slogan.
She didn’t finish the fight.
Nobody does. Our profession is proof of that: majority female for almost two decades now, and still fewer women in the dean’s office, still fewer women owning the practice, still a pay gap once you control for role and hours. Steinem gave a few generations the language and the permission to say that gap out loud. What happens next isn’t nostalgia, it’s on us.
Rest in power, Gloria.