Gloria Steinem: An Incarnation Well Lived

Gloria Steinem died at her home in New York City on September 2, 2026. She was ninety-two.

I want to acknowledge her passing because I loved her and I love what she did for us. I am part of the first generation of women who truly got to live inside what Gloria Steinem, and the women who came before and beside her, fought to make possible.

Gen X women, born between 1965 and 1980, are among the first to receive the fruit of those seeds.

I was born in 1978. I grew up in a world where I could imagine a life that was not predetermined for me. I was watching the foundation for it being laid all around me, in both small and profound ways. I could live alone. I could choose not to marry. I could choose not to have children. I could pursue a career, leave it, create another one, or step outside the conventional definition of success and define my own.

I could build a life according to what was actually true for me rather than what my family, my culture, a church, a bank, or an institution decided a woman was supposed to be.

That does not mean I have lived free of judgment. I have been judged by men and women, institutions and organizations, and I have experienced harassment, mistreatment, and limitation because I am a woman. But the women who came before me gave me something that made it possible to persevere through all of it: agency—the capacity to act independently, make free choices, and shape my own life.

There is a profound difference between being judged for a choice and not being permitted to have the choice at all.

The women who came before me largely did not have the freedoms I have had.

Because of their work, I have had the space to come to know myself. To recognize that I desired an unconventional life. To blissfully choose to be childfree. To opt out of marriage. To step into and away from a corporate career. To create work that feels meaningful to me. To live, as much as possible, on my own terms.

And I think this is one of the reasons I feel so passionate about these choices. I am not only grateful that I can make them. I am conscious that the women before me, by and large, could not.

My simple, joyful life lived fully on my own terms is, in some small way, an expression of gratitude to them—and an embodiment of their efforts.

I feel that in my soul.

The Soul Chooses Its Hour

In the yogic view, a soul does not arrive at random. It takes a body in a particular family, country, culture, and hour of history because that moment offers the precise conditions through which its dharma can unfold.

When I look at the shape of Gloria Steinem's ninety-two years, I cannot read it any other way.

She took a woman's body at the precise moment the question of what a woman was permitted to be was cracking open, and she spent her life inside that crack, holding it open so the rest of us could walk through.

The Chart of a Woman Built for This

In reviewing Gloria's natal chart, I do not see a woman who accidentally fell into a political movement. I see an assignment accepted.

She was Libra rising. Libra is the only sign in the zodiac represented not by a creature, but by an instrument: the scales. It speaks to fairness, balance, weighing, and what is owed. Her lagnesha, the ruler of her ascendant, is Venus—and where Venus sits, the themes of the entire life pour themselves.

Venus sits in Capricorn in the fourth house, conjunct Rahu, the north node of the Moon.

Venus represents the feminine principle: women, beauty, desire, partnership, harmony, and what we are permitted to value and possess. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn and speaks to institutions, law, hierarchy, and established structures. The fourth house is home, mother, roots, property, and the heart. Rahu is the disruptor—the outsider who refuses to accept the arrangement he was handed.

The feminine, placed inside the structures that govern the home, with the great disruptor sitting directly upon it.

Rahu conjunct Venus in Capricorn does not politely petition the structure for reform. It breaks the frame.

Directly opposite, in the tenth house of career and public karma, her Moon sits in Cancer, its own sign, conjunct Ketu, the south node of the Moon.

The Moon in Cancer in the tenth speaks to a public life shaped by feeling and collective impact. Ketu represents detachment and liberation—the part of us already finished with something. Moon with Ketu in the tenth does not hunger for the throne.

For decades, Gloria resisted being positioned as the singular leader of the women's movement. She deflected credit and insisted that the work was collective. In Vedic terms, there is something deeply resonant about that: karma yoga—action offered without attachment to the fruits of the action.

In short: a Libra ascendant to weigh what is fair. Venus with Rahu in the fourth to disrupt the structures governing women's lives. Moon in Cancer with Ketu in the tenth to hold the collective while refusing the crown.

She did not stumble into this life.

She came here to do this work.

Dates Worth Remembering

Here is what I think we forget: many of the freedoms women now experience as ordinary are extraordinarily recent.

1972. Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in federally funded education. Before this, women faced explicit barriers and quotas in professional education, including medicine and law.

1973. Roe v. Wade established constitutional protection for abortion before fetal viability. In 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned that protection and returned authority over abortion regulation to the states. (so scary).

1974. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited discrimination in credit based on sex and marital status. Before then, women could be (and would be) denied credit or required to have a male co-signer simply because they were women or because of their marital status.

1974 again. Congress amended the Fair Housing Act to include sex. Before that, a lender could (and would) legally require a husband's signature on a mortgage, ignore or discount a wife's income entirely, and ask a woman applicant about her birth control practices as part of evaluating her loan.

1978. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act made employment discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions a form of unlawful sex discrimination.

1993. The Family and Medical Leave Act provided eligible workers with job-protected family and medical leave.

Read that list again and notice how recent it is.

I was born in 1978. Some of the freedoms I grew up considering ordinary had been secured only within the span of my own childhood.

That is the part I don't want us to forget.

As sovereign individuals, there will always be people, institutions, and organizations that prefer control to freedom the execution of one’s own free will and agency—sometimes even presenting that control as “God's preference”, the “natural order,” or something they claim is “for our own good.”

Gloria Steinem and the women who came before us fought to create space for women to exercise their own agency and free will. They expanded the range of what a woman could imagine, choose, and become.

And yet the work is not finished.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was a powerful reminder that the right to execute one’s free will can and will be challenged by authority structures, and that there are still people and institutions that believe they deserve authority over women's bodies, choices, and lives.

So perhaps this is what Gloria's passing asks of those of us who have inherited the fruit:

Do not take the fruit for granted. Do not waste it.

The freedom to choose your life as you see fit is not merely a personal privilege. It is an inheritance. And the most meaningful way I can think to honor the women who fought for that inheritance is to live it fully—to know myself, to make my own choices, to resist the pressure to become someone else's idea of who a woman should be, and to leave even more room for the women who come after me.

Gloria Steinem lived her incarnation well. She planted seeds whose fruit she would never fully see.

I am one of the women living to continue the propagation of that fruit. And perhaps this is our responsibility now: to live the freedom we inherited so fully, so consciously, and so generously that the tree continues to grow—and the women who come after us find even more room to become who they are meant to be.