Gloria Steinem shaped the way America thought about women and sometimes how women thought about themselves. After her death, it is worth considering whether her vision delivered the liberty for women that she promised.
She was an icon to many women, remarkable in many ways for coolly championing women’s rights. I appreciate her work to fight sexual harassment and discrimination against women in the workplace and for equal pay. Steinem and Concerned Women for America Founder Beverly LaHaye, though completely different in their worldviews, contemporaneously blazed a trail for women to stand on the national stage of public policy.
However, Steinem was greatly misguided on the matter of abortion and tragically misled women into believing that their unique capacity to bear life is something to be feared, not celebrated.
Gloria herself admitted to having one abortion, saying, “It gave me my life. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to live my life otherwise.” Her worldview led women to believe the lie that they cannot have a successful career or live the lives they want if they have children. It is tragic that this pervasive worldview helped to enable 63 million abortions from Roe v. Wade through 2022, when it was overturned. Today, we finally have the ability to fight for life on a state-by-state basis.
But she was wrong, dead wrong. The reality is that millions of women have successful and fulfilling careers while bringing new life into this world. Athletes like Allyson Felix, Serena Williams, Kerri Walsh Jennings, or influencers like Meghan McCain and Allie Beth Stuckey. Most notably, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, mother of seven, has laid to rest that lie, and more will follow.
Women should not feel they must choose between motherhood and their careers. Our society should help women embrace the gift of motherhood and flourish in whatever occupation they want. A <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10257365/">study</a> from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that 60% of women who had abortions would have preferred to carry their pregnancies to term if they had received greater support, resources, or assistance.
She was also wrong about marriage. She viewed marriage as “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” a phrase she popularized. It was certainly misguided and has also led women to needlessly choose between career and marriage. Even she realized her error on this front. An <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/gloria-steinems-forthcoming-memoir">excerpt</a> from her forthcoming memoir is revealing: “Given my generation, I also grew up assuming that I would have to marry my identity, not become it. This scary idea caused me to put off marriage, and to live a temporary life. Not until my forties did I begin to see that a different kind of life was possible, one where I wasn’t bound to fulfill my husband&#8217;s dreams and depend on him financially. I learned that the work I loved could also create the future I wanted.” This is problematic both from the idea that a woman cannot flourish in her own God-given calling as a married woman and from shaming other women who want to live their lives forging a paycheck to serve their families. That too is changing.
I am glad she eventually embraced marriage, a trusted partnership that can provide love and stability, mutual satisfaction, and a solid foundation to raise children. Sadly, she was only married for three years before the love of her life, David Bale, tragically died of brain lymphoma.
Correctly, Gloria fought for women to be seen and recognized for their unique qualities and contributions. Today we are going in a completely different direction in which the unique dignity of women is being cast aside in favor of men and of gender identity politics. We see this most recently in the California ruling that undermined fairness in women’s sports. Women should defend women when biological sex is at stake.
The women’s movement that Gloria helped to lead ultimately wanted women to be equal to men, but her definition of equality trampled on the unique role of women to bear life, to be a mother, to desire marriage, to create a family, but in the end did not satisfy. A <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-so-blue-liberal-women-are-less-happy-more-lonely-but-why">recent study</a> found that only 12% of leftist women describe themselves as “completely satisfied with life,” but their conservative peers were three times more likely to be happy.
Today, young women are forging their own path again. A cooler version of conservative women are stepping up to the microphone and standing up for God’s unique design. Their workplace struggles continue, but they have seen through the propaganda and have found identity and liberty in the things of God rather than the world, truly choosing a path for themselves, not one that the Left has chosen for them. And for this I say, “you’ve come a long way, Baby!”
*** 
Penny Young Nance is CEO and President of Concerned Women for America (CWA), the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization, and author of “7 Rules for Success in Business and Life: A Woman’s Guide.” <a href="https://concernedwomen.org/">https://concernedwomen.org/</a>

The Feminist Press 35th Anniversary Gala Dinner

Gloria Steinem’s Legacy Was Largely Anti-Woman

abortion

feminism

gloria steinem

marriage

opinion

women in the workplace

When she was 22 years old, Gloria Steinem had an abortion. Looking back, she said that moment was pivotal in her life. The young Ms. Steinem believed that bearing a child – and getting married – would have radically narrowed the possibilities of her life. Earlier this year, she told an interviewer that at the time she saw marriage and children “not as a beginning but as an end.” When she wrote her memoir in 2015, Steinem <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/opinion/gloria-steinem-feminism-abortion.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/opinion/gloria-steinem-feminism-abortion.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077730000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2vnqpYq_nD4MkHKGPEVISL">dedicated</a> it to the doctor who performed the abortion, writing what he had asked of her: “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.” For Ms. Steinem, children were constricting, incompatible with the life of freedom she desired.
Although almost 70 years have passed since Steinem turned her back on motherhood in 1957, many American women continue to believe that motherhood in the United States is unfairly burdensome. Simultaneous with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-real-legacy-of-gloria-steinem">Steinem’s death</a>, newspaper headlines have been focused on a murder trial in Massachusetts, in which Lindsay Clancy has been charged with killing her three young children. While the main issue in the trial is whether Clancy’s mental state was so impaired that she cannot be held criminally responsible for their deaths, debate over the case has turned into a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-tiktok-sleuths-turned-a-horrific-child-killing-into-a-twisted-online-soap-opera">flashpoint on social media</a> for how American mothers perceive pregnancy, the postpartum period, and the task of raising young children. Without weighing in on the outcome in the Clancy trial, it is clear that part of the reason the case has struck such a nerve is that many mothers in the United States <a href="https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2026-08-28/why-the-lindsay-clancy-trial-has-energized-maternal-mental-health-advocates" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2026-08-28/why-the-lindsay-clancy-trial-has-energized-maternal-mental-health-advocates&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2205UNNeuvabONlerbr4Lx">feel isolated and unsupported</a> after the birth of a child.
Is it inevitable that motherhood be popularly viewed as limiting or constricting, preventing a woman from fully living the life she chooses? In the seven decades between when Steinem made her choice to end her pregnancy and today, why has there been so little cultural movement on how we popularly perceive motherhood?
Understanding and answering that question is vital as America stares down a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/17/is-us-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends-how-you-measure-it/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/17/is-us-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends-how-you-measure-it/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2Uueeme8wG4-2tjZrw_n-O">historically low fertility rate</a> and a population structure that is skewing ever older. When Steinem began her push for “women’s lib” in the 1970s, population decline and declining rates of motherhood were viewed as a positive. In a famous essay, &#8220;<a href="https://time.com/5795657/gloria-steinem-womens-liberation-progress/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://time.com/5795657/gloria-steinem-womens-liberation-progress/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1rLhrHetfVvy5OwCXMMUe6">What It Would Be Like If Women Win</a>,&#8221; Steinem wrote approvingly that the “population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum.” She would later <a href="https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/we-come-to-feminism-in-different-ways-gloria-steinem-on-a-lifetime-of-travels" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/we-come-to-feminism-in-different-ways-gloria-steinem-on-a-lifetime-of-travels&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0krKQxg9Nnm79eZJmS9IO6">worry in public</a> about the connection between overpopulation and environmental degradation.
Sixty years later, it is hard to be so sanguine about dramatic population decline. From other countries with even more catastrophic population decline than the U.S., <a href="https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2025-07-14/the-people-deficit-what-happens-when-depopulation-becomes-a-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2025-07-14/the-people-deficit-what-happens-when-depopulation-becomes-a-crisis&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3C3iKJoeMzn5qgOgYGE6gs">we know</a> that it may result in loss of economic productivity, as well as what journalist David Martin Davies calls “the erosion of communities and cultural continuity.”
For Steinem, and many of her second-wave feminist contemporaries, motherhood itself was often viewed as a method of oppression. Radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone famously wrote in her 1970 book, &#8220;The Dialectic of Sex,&#8221; “The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.”
As some of the fervor around the Clancy trial shows, there is a through line from that line of thinking popularized in the &#8217;70s to discussion around motherhood today. And indeed, it isn’t limited to those headlines. The &#8220;childfree&#8221; Reddit group has 1.6 million subscribers, with countless posts lauding the freedom of living without children and the sacrifice inherent to parenting.
In 2020, Steinem was asked if she regretted not having children. &#8220;Not for a millisecond,&#8221; <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/09/03/gloria-steinem-christian-bale-married-children/91590602007/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/09/03/gloria-steinem-christian-bale-married-children/91590602007/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw32LJsk57g0S07WIcAfd97c">she replied</a>. To be clear, there are indeed many ways to live a vibrant, flourishing life without being married or having children. However, the fact that we did not manage, over the course of Steinem’s lifetime, to shift the narrative much around motherhood, women’s independence, and freedom is its own form of national tragedy.
It is not inevitable that motherhood be understood primarily in terms of the resulting burdens and sacrifice. Having and raising babies does, of course, require significant commitment and indeed sometimes requires significant personal sacrifice. However, it can also throw open many doors. To <a href="https://thehomefront.substack.com/p/reasons-to-have-babies" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thehomefront.substack.com/p/reasons-to-have-babies&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788601077731000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0nWlUKMPDkbJ7be9jza8vp">list</a> just a few: Having children can provide a tangible link to both past and future generations and provides a clear mechanism to pass something real on into the future. Pregnancy and babies can also expand your focus in life away from work and toward your family and community, and also keep you connected through old age with younger generations.
Popular perceptions about how motherhood can actually expand your horizons (not solely limit them) would probably be dramatically boosted if there was more social, cultural, and political commitment to decreasing the burdens of young moms. Putting aside the terrible tragedy of the Clancy case, it is an indisputable fact that many new moms in America feel isolated and alone and are in desperate need of more support from their extended families, neighbors, religious institutions, and local governments.
In short, both Steinem’s passing and the furor over the Clancy trial should serve as a reminder that we still have significant work to do around how motherhood is perceived in the United States. In the 1970s, women rightfully resented not being able to own personal bank accounts, receive mortgages from many banks, or work without facing serious sexual harassment and a host of other injustices. Somehow, however, many of those rightfully dedicated to fixing those issues successfully tore down our positive vision of motherhood as well — a problem still not fixed today. We have much work in front of us to build a vision of being a mom that shows it opens doors, not just closes them.
***
Ivana Greco has several jobs, but her favorite is being a homeschooling mom of four.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Gemini_Generated_Image_z67f6wz67f6wz67f

How We Taught Women To Fear Motherhood

fertility rate

lindsay clancy

motherhood

Since the 20th century, American women have, sometimes admirably and other times viciously, clawed their way into every crevice of life. They fought for the right to vote, own property, and get an education. Then they fought for the right to equal pay and to divorce their husbands at will. Then they fought to legally abort their unborn children. Then they fought to become the girl boss in every workplace. Then they fought to end harassment and male misconduct by mandating that their word against the opposite sex was Godlike and final. 

And they won.
More women go to college and receive bachelor&#8217;s degrees than men. Women live longer and have lower rates of suicide, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Women almost always get custody of the child, and divorce is no-fault. We control their fertility at will, serve in the military, wear what we want, operate fighter planes, and make more money than we ever have.
I&#8217;ve yet to hear a single celebratory cry.
Instead, over half of liberal women under 30 reportedly have a mental health condition, over a quarter of unmarried, childless girlbosses are unhappy, and a historically low number of women believe they are <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/657707/gender-gaps-respect-women-worldwide.aspx">treated with respect</a>.
Why is this? Because the modern-day feminist is a fastidious one, and she&#8217;s only getting more aggravated by her make-believe misfortunes by the minute.
The unimpressive, corrupt, feckless Hillary Clinton lost her election to an egocentric billionaire in Donald Trump. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite Christine Blasey Ford wrongfully accusing the nominee of sexual assault, in a messy and ruthless scandal that publicly humiliated the innocent man and sparked a #MeToo movement we never really recovered from. Social media caught fire, siloing us into corners of the internet based on our whims, wants, and wishes, where we could either be affirmed or tricked into thinking we were not enough — sparking unprecedented rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, self-esteem issues, and body dysmorphia.
A liberal media, still reeling from the induction of their manufactured pariah to the Supreme Court, spent the better part of a decade convincing the female public that the president wasn&#8217;t just &#8220;orange&#8221; and &#8220;bad,&#8221; but that he was stripping away every right their foremothers had toiled to gain. The mentally unstable cried in the streets when Roe v. Wade — a terribly written Supreme Court opinion that said the right to an abortion was in the Constitution — was overturned so that states could decide whether to permit, restrict, or ban the act.
The Left decided Americans were racist and shoved Woke 1 onto our culture with the force of Lizzo, blurring the lines of what it even meant to be a woman, because suddenly men were women, women were men, pregnant mothers were birthing people, and men were doing Tampax commercials for a menstrual cycle that, luckily for them, was never going to come.
I blame Obama. But that’s a story for another time.
The reality is, life got really messy, confusing, and culturally cruel and unusual from around 2010 onward.
Since then, especially for conservatives, who innately wish to &#8220;conserve&#8221; traditions, norms, moral virtue, small government, and normalcy, it feels like the rug is constantly getting ripped from beneath us.
Up is down, right is left, prostitutes are being renamed &#8220;sex workers&#8221; as though it&#8217;s cool and totally inconsequential to be one. Having an OnlyFans is more than respected; it&#8217;s encouraged. Hookup culture is preferred to matrimony. #MyBodyMyChoice is now #MyHormonesMadeMeDoIt.
It&#8217;s no wonder we don&#8217;t believe men respect us. Why would they, when we don&#8217;t even respect ourselves?
In 2026, women are rallying behind a murderer who strangled her three babies to death because &#8220;she was a working mom.&#8221; She hadn&#8217;t been working for at least eight months, by the way, but did we just admit that women can&#8217;t have an intense career, a marriage, and children simultaneously, or our hormones might marionette our hands to sling an exercise band around our baby&#8217;s neck?
In 2026, women are donning hijabs left and right in solidarity with the religion that forces little girls to cover their bodies so that men aren’t turned on by them. The same women who claimed Republicans looked like the ladies of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’re posting on TikTok that Osama Bin Laden had a point.
In 2026, women are celebrating the murder of a young mother who was randomly stabbed on the streets of New York because she was a wealthy bank executive — essentially inducting the killer into their &#8220;murdering hall of fame&#8221; alongside Luigi Mangione, Karmelo Anthony, Tyler Robinson, and Lindsay Clancy.
In 2026, women in America have it all, yet have lost our ever-loving minds in the process.
Inspired by the satanic works of Margaret Sanger, Gloria Steinem, and Judith Butler, liberal feminists have helped to destroy society in a megalomaniac pursuit of their man-crushing power disguised as freedoms.
The only thing left for them to get away with is murder. And they’re pretty darn close.

US-CRIME-TRIAL-CLANCY

The Only Thing Left For Women To Do Is Literally Get Away With Murder

hijab

me too movement

For years, when interviewers asked for a favorite quote, I gave them Gloria Steinem’s: “We are linked, not ranked.” She used the line in 2013 as shorthand for her whole political vision. Women are not a tournament. We are not climbing over one another toward a single chair. We thrive when we treat our connection as a circle instead of a hierarchy.
I needed that line. In corporate life in the 1990s and early 2000s, the conventional wisdom held that there was room for only a few of us in executive team rooms and that the smart play was to swat the woman next to you out of the way. Steinem’s sentence rejected that scarcity story. The problem was the ranking, not the other woman.
I am a feminist. I adopted the word in college. Before that I was an athlete training eight hours a day, with no political opinions to speak of. What I had was a body that coaches treated as theirs to break and use to achieve their own goals.
My feminist awakening came after those years, when I understood that what happened to me was not a private misfortune. It was a pattern.
When I speak at conservative events — which I often do — I sometimes open with the same sentence: I am a feminist.
I did it at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Conference in 2024, even after I arrived and saw the theme on the conference t-shirts: “Feminine, not Feminist.” I thought about dropping my opener. Then I decided honesty and authenticity were the only useful things I had to offer these women.
I told the room I believe women should have the right to vote, to own property, to get credit in our own names without a husband’s signature, and to keep private spaces — including battered women’s shelters and locker rooms — private.
Young conservative women cheered. That is not a contradiction. It is the part of feminism that simply demands that women be treated as full human beings.
It is not an exaggeration to say that without the movement Steinem helped build, American women would still be fighting for credit in our own names, locked out of professions and college majors, and without real recourse when a husband turned the home into a crime scene by abusing his wife.
People can criticize feminism all they want — I have my own criticisms of third- and fourth-wave feminism, which often treat promiscuity as equality and the female sex as a costume to be donned by anyone, including men, who choose it — but her influence on those earlier, concrete freedoms cannot be overstated. She mattered to me as a young woman trying to make a life after years of physical and emotional abuse in sport by male coaches.
In college, I read “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” her 1983 essay collection. I read it once, then again. She wrote about pornography and female genital mutilation as illustrative of the ways women are treated as less than human.
In the most famous piece, she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and reported the cheap pay and sexual harassment that Hugh Hefner’s club imposed on women, while selling it as a glamorous career path.
It all added up to what I already knew in my bones: women&#8217;s personal experience is a political matter. And women, as a sex class, deserve protections under the law.
I met her in 2018, when I was chief marketing officer at Levi’s. We brought guests into company events, and I was the in-house interviewer — Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, and Jill Ellis (the winningest soccer coach in U.S. history). Steinem was the only one who made me nervous. Not a pop star. Not a coach. A woman who had changed the course of American women’s lives. A hero, for me anyway.
In 2020, when “Athlete A” — the documentary I produced and appeared in about Larry Nassar and the system that protected him — was released, she posted about it on X. She called it “the complicated story of one man in a position of power who sexually abuses women and the heroes — journalists, gymnasts, and police officers — who exposed the system which enabled him.”
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-1172721" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/09/IMG_3626-2.jpeg" alt="" width="415" height="487" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/09/IMG_3626-2.jpeg 481w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/09/IMG_3626-2-256x300.jpeg 256w" sizes=" (max-width: 415px) 100vw, 415px" /></div>
She said she could not think of anything more important to see in terms of truth-telling. I was honored. A woman who had spent her life naming power systems that kept women as second-class citizens had recognized the same architecture in sport. And she lauded the film, which went on to win an Emmy.
It would not be an overstatement to say that her later views on transgender ideology were a huge disappointment. For all her work on the oppression of women, she failed to see that this new doctrine is a continuation of that oppression: men in dresses insisting they are women, taking privacy, rights, and opportunities from actual women. Steinem came to treat those men as a kind of woman — linked, not ranked, inside the community of women.
They are not. They are men. And they are ranked at the top of the hierarchy whenever their feelings are placed above women’s sex-based rights.
That conclusion was not inevitable. Feminist icon Germaine Greer does not share it. Greer has said that transgender women are not women, and that surgery does not change sex. “Being without a penis doesn’t make you a woman any more than being without a womb makes you a man.”
Steinem was wrong on this. Terribly wrong. The man in the dress fooled her.
Steinem once said a woman has two choices: “She is a feminist or a masochist.” It is hard not to hear that line now as an indictment of women who call themselves feminists while handing men our privacy, our categories, and our very real identity — not as in “gender identity” but in who we literally are. On this question, that would include Steinem herself, as a masochist.
But we can praise the good without incinerating the whole person. At her death, I choose the harder thing: keep what she built and refuse the error that would undo it. “We are linked, not ranked” is still a true sentence about women, and people more broadly. It becomes a lie the moment it is used to smuggle men into the circle and then rank their claims above ours.
The work Steinem did during the first half of my life made the second half possible. The work still left to do is to defend the category she spent decades insisting was real: woman.
***
Jennifer Sey is the CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She is an author, filmmaker, and retired national champion gymnast.

Portrait Of Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Changed My Life. I Won’t Pretend She Was Right About Everything.

larry nassar

transgender policy debate

women's sports

Glowing obituaries are pouring in after the death of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who was born in 1934. The Associated Press called her “a potent voice of US feminism,” and the Washington Post heralded her as the “lodestar of the modern women’s movement.” It is hard to overstate her influence upon Western women.
Gloria Steinem wasn’t just one among many feminists; she was the “it” girl who normalized feminism and made it broadly attractive. Prior to her arrival on the scene, the movement was populated by angry, cantankerous, and mentally ill women whose irascibility made them difficult to work with: Kate Millett was mentally ill and an “out” bisexual; Angela Davis was an angry Black Panther; and Betty Friedan wasn’t the kind of woman other women dreamed of being like. And then came Gloria. Her long blond tresses, aviator glasses, and lithe physique opened the door to a new chapter for feminism. She was articulate, savvy, and a fresh force for the feminist movement.
Not everyone appreciated the star power she brought to the movement. Prominent feminist Phyllis Chesler wrote of her candidly:
<blockquote>
What can I say about Gloria? Only this: My generation of feminists needed Susan B. Anthony but we got Mary Tyler Moore. We needed Harriet Tubman but we got Jane Fonda. We got the blonde, blow-dried feminist in the aviator glasses, the one in the skinny jeans, the feminist who posed in a bubble bath for People magazine. As glamorous as a movie star, Gloria repeatedly gave the same pseudo-apology: “I’m not that attractive. I’m only attractive . . . for a feminist.”
</blockquote>
Her attractiveness and comparisons to Mary Tyler Moore and Fonda, however, were exactly what the movement needed to take hold in the imaginations of millions of American women. She became the high priestess, carefully crafting an image of “the new feminist woman” through media, protests, and, of course, the pages of Ms. Magazine.
Steinem’s appeal never seemed to wane, morphing with the culture and rebranding the movement to make sure it maintained its freshness. Her one misstep was the Land’s End photoshoot, which outraged its family oriented customer-base and was quickly removed. But she didn’t need families and was able to maintain the limelight through her powerful friends.  As recently as 2022, she appeared with Meghan Markle to discuss the fall of Roe v. Wade. As I explained in my book &#8220;<a href="https://amzn.to/4zVxF2S" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://amzn.to/4zVxF2S&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788546020381000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0TlZ7o_yflADjo1jru_auZ">The End of Woman</a>,&#8221; she may have been the first to say publicly that a child would have ruined her life:
<blockquote>
Steinem and Meghan Markle sat together with Vogue magazine, discussing their concerns as the debate over abortion policy returned to the democratic process. The two discussed their concerns and fears, as well as Gloria’s own abortion. “I would have been stopped there,” the eighty-eight-year-old confessed, ruminating over what would have happened if she had had a baby as a young single woman. “I was working as a waitress in London waiting for my visa to India, where I had a fellowship. I wouldn’t have been able to do that. My life would’ve stopped there.”
</blockquote>
Today, Steinem is still deeply relevant, and female celebrities are clamoring to pay their respects. <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/gloria-steinem-tributes-hillary-clinton-meghan-markle-1235617328/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/gloria-steinem-tributes-hillary-clinton-meghan-markle-1235617328/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788546020381000&amp;usg=AOvVaw06osrAW9Yq8ZpMF3kQadWm">Everyone</a> from Hilary Clinton and Jill Biden to Meghan Markle and Lena Dunham is posting their images with the icon.
Though she was fashionable on the outside, her real power was interior. Steinem deeply embodied the new feminist anthropology that took the West by storm, slowly phasing out the millennia-old Judeo-Christian anthropology of Genesis 1. Instead of understanding that men and women were both created in God’s image and likeness and were meant to procreate and serve one another, Gloria promoted the feminist notion that men are contemptible — and women need to become just like them.
This feminist vision, planted centuries before by Mary Wollstonecraft, took root in her life. It can be seen in her quotes such as, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”; “A gender-equal society would be one where the word &#8216;gender&#8217; does not exist: where everyone can be themselves”; and “Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.”
Steinem’s disregard for men can be traced back to her extremely difficult childhood. Her father was a traveling salesman, gone most of the time while providing very little financially or emotionally. Young Gloria was left for months at a time to care for her mentally ill and bedridden mother — truly something no child should be left to do. This brokenness made her one of the Lost Girls, the women with serious issues who believed that scuttling tradition, morals, and gender were the most effective ways to help others. She, like the other Lost Girls, adopted feminism as a kind of bubble wrap against any kind of vulnerability that comes with being a female. Unfortunately, these Lost Girls and their grasp on the culture have cemented into generations of women the belief that their best life is lived in pursuit of radical autonomy, with men and children along as nice accessories, but certainly not essentials to female happiness.
Today, we live with the results of this tragic twisting of women into ersatz men (and not good men). Mental illness is through the roof, with one in every five women on some kind of antidepressant medication, the war between the sexes is at an all-time high (with the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQRKL4BxrEM" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DdQRKL4BxrEM&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788546020381000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1qwKGaClHtYqHGtkaXe-6H">New Statesman</a> reporting that among young women, only 35% of women under 25 have a favorable view of men), and the West faces a birth dearth that threatens us on a civilizational level. Western women are simply not having children. This is the real fruit of feminism and the feminist anthropology. It has slowly corroded civilization from the inside out. Gratefully, more and more women and men are waking up to reality.
Today, Steinem is still heralded as a heroine, but future generations will likely not treat her so kindly. Truly, she was the model of everything that has betrayed the vital and beautiful nature of women and men. That’s her real legacy. May she rest in peace.
***
Carrie Gress is the founder and co-editor of the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. She is the author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/End-Woman-Smashing-Patriarchy-Destroyed/dp/1684514185/ref=sr_1_2?crid=17NAROBYVRIMV&amp;keywords=carrie+gress&amp;qid=1690307577&amp;sprefix=carrie+gress%2Caps%2C73&amp;sr=8-2">The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us</a>” and &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Something-Wicked-Feminism-Fused-Christianity/dp/B0FQFVNVJL/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0">Something Wicked</a>.&#8221; 
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-1356831715

The Real Legacy Of Gloria Steinem

meghan markle

roe v wade

Gloria Steinem, the feminist firebrand who spent over half a century convincing American women that marriage was a trap and standard households were a capitalist scam, died on Wednesday at the age of 92.
For decades, the Toledo, Ohio, native served as the undisputed poster girl for second-wave feminism. Steinem transformed from a New York freelance writer into a feminist icon, taking direct aim at traditional values, especially the classic American family.
Steinem’s crusade against the traditional home wasn’t subtle. In her 1996 Address to the Feminist Family Values Forum, she <a href="https://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/family/ffvfsteinem.htm">stated</a>:
<blockquote>
I think the first thing we need to re-consider about &#8220;family values&#8221; is saying &#8220;family&#8221; in the singular. That is a right wing trip altogether. The minute you say &#8220;family&#8221; in the singular, it defines one kind of family as normal and renders all other forms peripheral or wrong. &#8230; The patriarchal, nuclear family that we are supposed to think is the normal and only one, that kind of family is really only about one-hundred-and-fifty-years-old, and is almost entirely the function of industrialization and capitalism. It was a form invented to make people portable, so they could be shipped about at the will of their employers, something that could not be done with big, extended, communal families. &#8230; The idea that there is only one family form is really pure bullsh*t. 
</blockquote>
Steinem’s big break arrived in 1963 when she went undercover as a &#8220;Playboy Bunny&#8221; to document working conditions at New York&#8217;s Playboy Club. By 1971, she joined forces with leftist icons Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm to launch the National Women&#8217;s Political Caucus. A year later, she co-founded &#8220;Ms.&#8221; magazine, turning it into a mouthpiece for the women&#8217;s liberation movement.
Steinem’s patience for women who rejected her leftist script was notoriously thin. While she claimed conservative women had every right to hold bad opinions, she routinely threw mud at them. During Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison’s 1993 Senate run, Steinem dismissed the GOP candidate as a &#8220;female impersonator&#8221; for failing to adopt her radical platform.
Steinem spent the 1980s railing against President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. When George W. Bush took office after the disputed 2000 election, she publicly threw a tantrum, declaring he was &#8220;not our elected president.&#8221; Decades later, she pulled the same routine on President Donald Trump, marching in the streets and declaring that he didn&#8217;t represent her values.
Despite spending most of her life popularizing the idea that women don&#8217;t need men, Steinem eventually tied the knot at age 66, marrying David Bale in 2000, making actor Christian Bale her stepson. She spent her final years collecting establishment honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2013.

Gloria Steinem

Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Dead At 92

ms magazine

national women's political caucus

politics

Lindsay Clancy 3

No News Is Bad News. The Clancy Case Should Be Over By Now.

insanity defense

jury deliberation

postpartum psychosis

Portrait Of Dolly Parton

Why We Can’t Let The Left Make Dolly Their Socialist Mascot

black lives matter

democratic socialists of america

dolly parton

socialism

Clancy

Lindsay Clancy Defenders Are Just As Sick As She Is

illegal immigration

postpartum depression

Over the weekend, AOC announced to the world that she is freezing her eggs. She claims the message “educates” and “empowers” women. It does not. Her unsolicited declaration perpetuates a myth that women can have the ideal life whenever they want without consequence. It also makes it likely that even more children will grow up in fatherless homes.
The democratic socialist congresswoman’s decision was surprising to many people given her 11-year relationship and four-year engagement to fiancé Riley Roberts. Freezing your eggs at 36 when you already have a partner you claim to love seems unnecessary and raised suspicions. The media later reported that the couple quietly <a href="https://x.com/TMZ/status/2087294265843908813?s=20">ended their relationship two years ago.</a>
If true, AOC’s motives are even more transparent. In addition to clicks and attention, she wants insurance for the moment when she does decide to have a family that she’ll have viable eggs to do so — even if there is no man in the picture.
With their “pro-family at any age” argument, some <a href="https://x.com/LydiaMoynihan/status/2086821381044305933?s=20">conservatives are condemning those who criticize AOC’s choices</a>. Conservatives cannot be the pro-family party without supporting egg freezing, they say.
What they fail to acknowledge is that encouraging women to freeze their eggs opens the door to an influx of fatherless children. Nothing could be less “pro-family” or worse for society than that. <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/do-two-parents-matter-more-than-ever">Research</a> shows that children raised in a two-parent household — specifically with a mother and a father — find more success in life, whether that be educational, financial, health, or emotional.
Feminism succeeded in convincing women that financial gain, upward mobility, and independence were admirable goals — more admirable than finding a partner and starting a family. Thus, America is now filled with so many successful, independent, and single women that it’s often called the “<a href="https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/womens-impact-on-the-economy">Sheconomy</a>.” Women comprise nearly half the U.S. labor force, and single women, almost a quarter.
Many women wear this status as a badge of honor. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lPQZni7I18">Songs are written</a> to glamorize it. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJfhrLoQl5w">Movies are produced</a> to sell it. However, it has also made finding a worthy partner more challenging for these women.
They no longer choose a partner for financial stability or a man’s ability to be a good father. They choose based on credentials that are often difficult to meet, adopting a romanticized version of love sold by Hollywood.
Women still tend to want to “<a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/krCGqdc9BYk?si=TCkuFo6JW8jI3_Iw">marry up</a>,” but when they already have successful careers, a house, and multiple degrees, the bar is very high for most men to clear. Many women say they can’t find a mate that meets their standards.
Feminism has taught women that, in fact, they don’t need a man and then, through policy and cultural shifts, concocted a society to make that possible, even without large paychecks.
Yet, biology is real, and women can’t outrun Father Time or Mother Nature. That clock will start ticking. Why not have a child without a father? they ask. A woman like AOC can now afford it on her own (or with likely <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/10/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-announces-actions-to-lower-costs-and-expand-access-to-in-vitro-fertilization-ivf-and-high-quality-fertility-care/">increasing government subsidies</a>), culture has told her it’s “bad ass” and “empowering” to freeze her eggs, and science has figured out how to impregnate her without a husband, calling it “reproductive care.”
This puts the desires of adults before the needs of children, as <a href="https://x.com/Katy_Faust/status/2086847676000485652?s=20">Katy Faust</a>, founder of <a href="https://thembeforeus.com/">Them Before Us</a>, often points out. The purpose of a marriage is the “establishment of an environment that’s beneficial to children,” <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/gP79Xb0kznA?si=AXgjaRU2T1ZImtyV">Jordan Peterson says</a>, not the happiness of the husband and wife.
Society has delayed and then medicalized the most natural part of a woman’s life cycle — getting married and having children. It seems the harder we try to optimize women’s lives, the <a href="https://theworlddata.com/womens-mental-health-statistics-in-us/">more miserable they are</a>.
Rather than manufacturing unnatural solutions to today’s <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-2026-state-of-fertility-report">declining replacement rates</a>, health agencies and researchers should focus on uncovering the <a href="https://www.factsaboutfertility.org/">root causes</a> of delayed marriage and inability to conceive, and <a href="https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/saving-america-saving-the-family-foundation-the-next-250-years">restore the proper purpose of marriage</a>.
Science has done many wonderful things, but redefining family and re-engineering the natural order and goodness of family is not one of them.
The <a href="https://a.co/d/0jc0UaZZ">first and most crucial bond</a> for a healthy society is marriage and the natural family. Disrupting it places primacy on the state, which is why our country has found itself increasingly engulfed by federal policy and bureaucratic solutions.
Maybe this is why AOC is encouraging women to freeze eggs, even with the potential financial and health risks involved. More women having babies without fathers means more opportunities for the state to step in.
A home with a mother and a father in a loving relationship is the best scenario to raise a healthy child. While that is not always possible, freezing eggs will not get us closer to that ideal situation — it will push us further away. AOC’s choices are not a model to uphold.
***
Jennifer Galardi is a Senior Policy Analyst for Restoring American Wellness at the Heritage Foundation.

Egg storage for IVF

Freezing Eggs Is One Step Toward A Fatherless Dystopia

alexandria ocasio-cortez

egg freezing

fatherlessness

In 1999 there was a popular song that I learned all the words to when I was way too young to know what I was actually saying. The chorus to “What Would You Do?” by the band City High included a line that said, “What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor ‘cause he’s hungry / and the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money?” 
At the time I didn’t think much about the message behind the pop song. But I can’t say the same holds true after slogging through 656 pages of Kathryn Stockett’s latest historical fiction release, “The Calamity Club.” This was the author’s highly anticipated follow-up to her runaway hit in 2009, “The Help.”
Stockett used way more words to say essentially the same thing as the brilliant lyricists behind “What Would You Do?” The entire book is a defense, and an unrealistic portrayal, of “ethical” prostitution that’s as predictable as it is exhausting. The author tries to convince the reader that having sex for money is fine if it’s for a good cause. 
The extra-long book, which is currently holding strong at #2 on the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/combined-print-and-e-book-fiction/">bestseller list</a> in the fiction category, was most certainly a calamity. It was also sorely lacking an editor — not to mention a reality check.
It’s interesting how the book’s description doesn’t explicitly mention the gist of the novel, which paints prostitution in a sympathetic light. I can’t say I’m privy to the marketing agenda of publisher Spiegel &amp; Grau, but my guess is that the team was intentionally vague to attract a larger audience. Even in the age of OnlyFans, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-onlyfans-success-story-thats-missing-a-dark-reality">explicitly glorifying sex work</a> is a hard sell for most readers.
“In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high,” the book’s synopsis <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228820257-the-calamity-club">says</a>. 
The wokest among us will call it female empowerment, of course. But what’s even more baffling is how Stockett tried to convince the reader that the female characters would line up to sell sex for quick cash and, even worse, that this was all inevitable. 
The action takes place in 1933 as the Great Depression wreaks havoc on the nation. Stockett repeatedly mentions well-to-do families who lose everything, including the millionaires down the road and the main characters themselves, who are hoodwinked by a lying husband/son who is both terrible at investing and secretly gay. 
Women have the right to vote but lack the ability to purchase mass quantities of condoms without being shamed or outright denied. The implication is clear: These women are oppressed, and their only recourse is to sell their bodies for money. What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor? What would you do if you were about to lose your childhood home? Your daughter? Your sanity?
There is pushback from the main character, the wise spinster sister Birdie, who is painted as being more clever and level-headed than anyone else in the book. But eventually she caves to the pressures of Charlie, who was previously arrested and thrown in prison for solicitation, or possibly just for speaking to a black man, it’s not exactly clear which. Charlie thinks a short-term brothel is the answer to all their problems. And she has enough life experience to put it all together.
Spoilers ahead. The main conflict in the book is financial, but it’s also about sex-based discrimination. The women are painted as being resourceful, but they are also products of their time and therefore unable to earn living wages on their own. Given that the men in their lives are useless, they are forced to take matters into their own hands. Which, in this case, means resorting to the world’s oldest profession.
Charlie becomes the madam of the temporary brothel, and Birdie is her skeptical accomplice. They are always one step ahead of getting caught: by the police, by the homeowner whose mansion they are using to entertain customers, and by the overtly religious busybody in town, Garnett Pittman, the hypocritical chairlady of the local orphan asylum who becomes president of the Anti-Vice League for the state of Mississippi.
It’s worth spending some time on the novel&#8217;s primary antagonist. Garnett is cartoonishly evil and is the one who pulled strings to have Charlie sterilized and institutionalized to protect Garnett&#8217;s husband&#8217;s secret — that he fathered the now 11-year-old Meg during a one-night stand when Charlie was 17. Garnett punishes Meg at the orphanage for her parentage and conspires to keep her mother locked away forever.
Modern fiction is chock-full of hypocritical Christian characters just like Garnett. It’s almost a given that once devout Christianity is mentioned, that person will be one of the bad guys. Meanwhile, the true virtuous people are always the ones questioning religion, questioning authority, and generally ditching traditional moral virtues for a “do what I want” existence.
It sounds a lot like the modern day progressive party, come to think of it.
Stockett says during the “Author’s Note” section at the end of the book that she was inspired to write the story because of a law passed in 1928 that allowed the sterilization of women deemed to be “imbeciles,” including “promiscuous women.” She felt compelled to speak out against these atrocities, but instead of arguing against eugenics, she wrote a book that essentially says short-term prostitution is a great way to solve financial hardship.
One of the downfalls of the book is that the brothel never gets busted. The homeowner, a well-to-do older woman who would ostensibly not agree to her family home being turned into a house of ill-repute, goes along with the plan after she figures out what’s going on. So do the maids and Birdie’s bank manager boyfriend. This kind of behavior from all the main characters would be far-fetched in 2026 and feels even more so in the mid-1930s.
As a reader, it feels like the whole 600-plus page story is barreling toward disaster. But then in the end there’s just nothing. The women make a lot of money. The homeowner pays off the mortgage and keeps her home. Charlie gets her daughter back. The cops bust a different, more corrupt brothel instead. The women involved get in, get out, and then move on to live the rest of their lives completely unscathed by their actions. 
As popular as it was, “The Help” became controversial because it centered on a white savior narrative, marginalizing the voices of black domestic workers, as the critics said. “The Calamity Club” has so far been embraced by mainstream critics because it does none of that. Instead, it presents a problem and provides a solution that’s free from legal or moral consequences, despite how ludicrous that is in the real world. 
But why would the critics take issue? They’re a lot more scandalized by racial narratives than they are by prostitution for a good cause.
Last year, OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain went viral for <a href="https://x.com/sophieraiin/status/1932540900749758841?lang=en">chastising Bonnie Blue</a>, a pornographic film actress, for “the trauma she’s causing herself and so many women.” Rain was upset that Blue’s stunts of sleeping with thousands of men in a single day were turning her profession into a laughingstock and said her antics meant it was “no longer about female empowerment.”
Rain’s issue is not realizing that being a little bit of a porn star is not possible, just like Stockett’s version of prostitution doesn’t make it morally acceptable. It doesn’t matter if the women only slept with men for money for a short time. It doesn’t matter that they paid off their debts. In this book, the ends do not in fact justify the means. 
Blue’s antics do the world a favor because they are honest. Her line of &#8220;work&#8221; is gross and seedy and should be seen as such. Stockett is never able to make a case for “ethical prostitution” any better than a vegetarian can justify ordering Big Macs from a McDonald’s drive-thru. 
“The Calamity Club” is moral relativism at its finest, which is probably why the leftists are fawning over it. 
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-2288230963

This Bestseller Turns Prostitution Into ‘Female Empowerment’

book review

kathryn stockett

prostitution

the calamity club

When I talk publicly about how raising my baby is beautiful, not oppressive, feminists get mad. We never said that! they claim. To that I can only ask, Have you read second-wave feminist literature? Second-wave feminists did, in fact, call motherhood oppressive.
And ever since the &#8217;60s, the media&#8217;s advertising for the role hasn&#8217;t been particularly good. Culture followed the feminists&#8217; lead by portraying motherhood in an unfavorable light — both in obvious and more subtle ways. The prevailing messages always seem to reiterate the same point: Having children will ruin your life and strip you of your freedom forever.
It&#8217;s just as evident in today&#8217;s media as it was decades ago. While on maternity leave, I started watching three different shows. Each one introduced a pregnancy storyline, and in every case, the female lead chose to abort her baby. For one, it wasn&#8217;t the right time. For another, it would ruin her career. For the third, she wouldn&#8217;t be able to attend her dream school.
The state of modern television is just one of the many examples of the oppressive messaging that still permeates the media. Motherhood is portrayed as such a terrible fate that it is presented as better to terminate the life of your baby than to become a mother. As a new mom, holding my sleeping baby, I turned off each of those shows. The juxtaposition between what the media was telling me and what I was actually experiencing was striking.
Motherhood has far exceeded my already high expectations. Looking at my son&#8217;s face, I couldn&#8217;t find the oppression. It unlocked a million new horizons — new highs and even new lows — but most importantly, it brought a precious new human being into my life, one I have the privilege of raising and calling my own. There is no &#8220;sentence&#8221; more beautiful than that.
So, from my nursery rocking chair, I recorded a simple video on social media saying so.
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Since then, women have made their own videos highlighting moments from their lives as mothers using my video’s audio, while another corner of the internet has taken personal offense. Many feminists responded with videos declaring, &#8220;We never said that.&#8221; That&#8217;s odd because I didn&#8217;t even use the word feminist. But perhaps they recognized that the language I criticized did, in fact, stem from their movement.
&#8220;They&#8221; did, in fact, say that.
It wasn&#8217;t difficult to dive into feminist literature from the 1960s and 1970s and find numerous direct quotes from influential figures saying that motherhood is oppressive. Shulamith Firestone wrote in her 1970 book &#8220;The Dialectic of Sex,&#8221; &#8220;The heart of a woman&#8217;s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.&#8221;
Other notable examples include quotes from prominent feminist writers equating fetuses to parasites and describing domestic life as &#8220;comfortable concentration camps.&#8221; The list goes on and on, so much so that I made an entire video outlining my findings.
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Perhaps one takeaway from the current outrage is that many people are no longer reading the rhetoric of their movement&#8217;s icons from decades ago. Or perhaps they want to distance themselves from their more radical predecessors and present a more peaceful picture of what their movement represents.
Probably not, but one can hope. Considering that the modern feminist movement still celebrates what I view as one of the most heinous practices in the United States, I doubt it. It always comes back to abortion.
For a movement to justify such an act, motherhood must still be portrayed, directly or indirectly, as oppression. Only if motherhood is seen as a fate worse than death does the argument for ending an unborn child&#8217;s life become coherent (though still deeply flawed). They may not say it as bluntly anymore, but I believe the core tenets from sexual revolution authors to modern-day influencers remain the same.
As for me, I&#8217;ll stick with another message for the masses: Motherhood is the most important role I will ever have, and it is not oppression. Motherhood is simply the best.
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The Cultural Lie That Turned Motherhood Into A Burden

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