Gloria Steinem Changed America. That Is Precisely the Problem.

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and for six decades she was the most recognizable face of American feminism. The aviator glasses, the streaked hair, the magazine she co-founded, the marches, the speeches she said she was terrified to give and gave anyway. She was a genuinely gifted communicator, and she built something that outlasted her. It is important to consider the destination she drove toward, because she was a woman who moved a culture.

Her death is worth pausing on, to consider deeply, because who she was mattered to so many.

Steinem was born in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression. There is no nationally comparable happiness survey from which we can tell whether women were happier then. The modern data begin decades later, in the 1970s, just as Steinem and Betty Friedan were helping lead one side of the country’s increasingly public argument over what women’s lives were supposed to be, an argument that would eventually put them in direct opposition to Phyllis Schlafly and the traditionalist movement she led.

Here is the test I want to apply to her legacy, and it is not a theological one. The movement Steinem helped lead promised that expanding women’s choices and freeing them from traditional roles would make their lives better. Fifty years later, we can check that promise against the data. 

Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published a paper in 2009 called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” They are not conservatives. They were not trying to prove a point about traditional womanhood. What they found was this: women in the early 1970s reported being happier than men. By the time of their study, that had flipped, and the gap had been widening ever since. The remarkable thing is not that women became more educated, more economically independent, and more legally equal. They did. It is that those gains were accompanied by a long decline in women’s reported happiness rather than the increase the liberation narrative would have predicted.

Anxiety disorders are diagnosed in women at roughly twice the rate they are in men, and that gap widened during the exact decades this new definition of a successful woman became culturally dominant. None of this proves that feminism caused the rise in anxiety. It does, however, make it difficult to argue that the cultural revolution produced the psychological liberation its advocates promised. You do not have to prove a single cause to notice the failure to deliver on the promise that was made.

The data on what it actually produced keeps landing in the same place. A 2025 Women’s Well-Being Survey from the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute, based on 3,000 American women ages 25 to 55, found married mothers nearly twice as likely to describe themselves as very happy compared to unmarried, childless women, even after controlling for age, income, and education. Not the most liberated. Not the most professionally credentialed. The married mothers, the group the liberation narrative told us should be struggling the most. This is not a recycled talking point from decades ago. Researchers went looking for the answer in 2025, and this is what they found.

If the movement told women that marriage and motherhood were constraints from which they needed to be liberated, why are the women actually living those lives reporting some of the highest levels of well-being in the survey? Gloria Steinem was a strong leader. She was just leading in the wrong direction, and two generations of American women have paid for the trip.

Here is what makes her role in this more complicated than many celebrations of her work recognizes. She did not simply argue that women deserved equal treatment under the law. Almost nobody serious disagrees with that, and I certainly do not. She went further, arguing that traditional domestic life itself was something close to a trap, that being a wife and mother was less than a life fully lived. 

The movement she helped build was extraordinarily successful at expanding women’s access to the privileges associated with equality. It was much less interested in asking whether equality also meant sharing the obligations, risks, and sacrifices traditionally imposed on men. She was not out there demanding women be drafted into combat alongside men, or organizing to get women into the commercial fishing fleets and mining crews that remain, disproportionately, the most dangerous work in American life. Real equality would have meant sharing the whole picture, the risk and the burden along with the freedom and the opportunity. Instead the movement’s definition of equality stopped at the ledger of rights.

That is not equality. It is a very well marketed version of liberation in which the obligations of one world survive inside the freedom of another. Women were told they could build a career, raise a family, maintain a household, and experience all of it as liberation, with the costs rarely presented as part of the bargain.

There is a darker layer to her story with painful echoes all across our culture. Steinem had an illegal abortion at twenty two, in London, before she ever set foot in the movement that would make her famous, and she later described the experience as central to everything that came after. Her conclusion from that experience was radically different from mine. She spent much of the rest of her life arguing that a woman’s control over her own body had to include the right to end the life growing inside it. I think that is a genuinely tragic evil of killing to turn into a fundamental rights crusade. It asked millions of women to treat the most distinctive capacity given to womankind, the ability to carry and bring forth life, something no man will ever experience, as a liability to be managed rather than a gift to be stewarded. That is not liberation. That is moral inversion, dressed up in the language of freedom.

She told us enough that I think some level of understanding and compassion for her story is warranted. Steinem said she never became close to her mother, who had suffered a breakdown and whom a young Gloria had to care for as a child. In an HBO documentary about her own life, she put it plainly: I was so fearful of becoming her. She never had children, and said she never regretted it for a single moment, because it was important, in her words, that some women not have children, to show that they had a choice. I will let the reader draw the line I see between those two facts. A woman who feared becoming her own mother chose never to become one at all, and the one pregnancy she did carry, at twenty two, ended in an abortion she later called the beginning of her whole life’s direction.

She did eventually marry, at 66, decades past any possibility of the children she had already decided against. She married David Bale, and her own account of why is remarkably candid: we wanted to be together, we loved each other, he needed a green card. All three reasons, offered in the same breath, with the green card sitting right alongside the love as if it belonged there. Even when she was not tearing down the institution of marriage as unnecessary, she never seemed to grasp the purpose and meaning of a lifelong covenant before God. She did care for her husband even as he struggled with his health at the end of his life, and I find that admirable.

In her final decade of public life, she was most visible not as a working journalist or an organizer building anything new, but showing up at the Women’s March and similar rallies for abortion rights, one voice among a crowd of women in pink knitted hats. It is almost fitting that she left the stage just before the movement she helped build turned on itself in the fight between gender critical feminists and transgender activism, a fight that would have forced her, for the first time in six decades, to say clearly what she actually believed a woman was.

One more thread is wild to consider the implications of. From 1958 to 1962, Steinem founded and ran the Independent Research Service, an organization funded by the CIA to send young Americans to Soviet aligned youth festivals in Europe. This became public in 1967, and she never denied it. She defended it, and even praised the agency, saying, in my experience the Agency was completely different from its image, it was liberal, nonviolent, and honorable. That does not make her a spy, and it does not make feminism a CIA operation. It does complicate the mythology of Steinem as an entirely organic insurgent who rose up outside the structures of American power. The woman remembered as an outsider challenging American power had her early political career financed by an arm of it.

Reckoning with the legacy of a famous person who dies can tempt us to reach for an unfair caricature. I am not going to pretend she was some cartoon of malice. She was, by every account, warm in person, funny, generous with her time, genuinely moved by the women who came up to her after speeches to tell her their stories. That is real, and it matters. Warmth and sincerity do not make an idea correct. They just make it more persuasive, and Steinem was extraordinarily persuasive.

The final measure of any movement is not how powerful its rhetoric was. It is what happened to the people who lived under its influence.

Fifty years later, the evidence is not what Steinem’s movement promised. Married mothers report some of the highest levels of happiness among American women. The female happiness advantage of the 1970s has disappeared, and the anxiety gap has grown wider. A culture that promised women freedom from the supposed constraints of marriage and motherhood has left many of them less certain that the life they were told to want is actually the life that makes them happy.

Steinem changed America.

She changed what millions of women believed was possible, desirable, and worth pursuing.

That is an enormous legacy.

I just do not think it was a good one.

Clayton Wood is the Executive Director of Wears Valley Ranch and Thrive.