Gloria Steinem Is Gone - But Which Wave of Feminism Does Her Death Actually Belong To?

The Wave That Keeps Breaking Differently In 1963, Betty

Friedan opened The Feminine Mystique with a complaint no survey had yet measured: educated American women, comfortable and idle, asking "is this all?" That book helped launch the Second Wave, which drew a line few had drawn before - between the public world of law and the private world of the home - and insisted the line itself was political. Gloria Steinem, who died this week at 92, became its most recognisable face: co-founder of Ms. magazine, undercover investigator of Playboy's treatment of its own employees, the public voice demanding that women's labour, at the office and in the bedroom, both count as labour.

Where the

pattern held The Second Wave's central move was expanding what counted as a political question. Reproductive choice, domestic violence, workplace discrimination - all had been treated as private misfortune. Steinem, alongside Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, forced them into public debate and won real ground: the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and eventually Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Where it broke By the late 1980s, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw was naming what the Second Wave had quietly assumed away: that "women" was not one category.

Black American women fighting workplace discrimination or Dalit women in India fighting caste and gender exclusion simultaneously, were not experiencing two separate burdens stacked on top of each other - the two compounded into something the earlier framework had no name for.

Steinem's own decades-long collaborator in India, economist Devaki Jain, pushed her toward exactly this recognition; by her second India visit in the early 2010s, Steinem was explicitly comparing caste to race as a structure that keeps gender hierarchies alive.

Here is where the parallel genuinely breaks and it is the interesting part: Steinem never abandoned the binary - man, woman - that the Second Wave had needed to build a mass movement in the first place. Miranda House principal Bijayalaxmi Nanda has described this as closer to "strategic essentialism" than oversight - it is difficult to win reproductive rights for "women" if the movement first spends a decade contesting who counts as one.

The Fourth Wave, arriving with #MeToo in the 2010s, could afford to widen the category to LGBTQ+ identities precisely because the Second Wave had already secured the institutional ground - the law, the language, the legitimacy - on which that widening could stand.

What this means for the exam-relevant question The interesting fact about Steinem's career is not that she lived through four waves - it is that she embodied the friction between them: a Second-Wave leader who, unusually, kept revising her own framework as a Third-Wave critique caught up with her. That sequencing - expansion first, correction second - is not unique to American feminism. It recurs whenever a rights movement wins ground using one unifying category, only to discover later how much that category concealed. Reading Steinem's obituary as biography misses this; reading it as the latest instance of a recurring pattern in how movements evolve is what actually earns marks.