And so the girl from Toledo became Gloria Steinem, a powerful figure on the national stage, not just because she was pretty and, as the old Hollywood saying used to go, “free, white and 21.” Her writing illuminates in ways big and small that she never stopped putting in the work. To the very end, she was — away from the cameras, the podiums and the marches — committed to reading deeply, and to connecting the dots in new ways. Her home in a brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which you can tour online, is filled with books, including a shelf she dedicated to those by “Friends Who Write.”

She kept receipts for purchases she made from Doubleday Book Shop, and records of the books that shaped her worldview: Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March”; “The Color Purple,” by her dear friend Alice Walker; “The Woman Warrior,” by Maxine Hong Kingston; “This Bridge Called My Back,” an anthology of writing by women of color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.

In 2022, Steinem told The Boston Globe: “I always wanted to be a writer ever since I was a little girl reading Louisa May Alcott. But I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I didn’t know how I was going to make a living. You know, it was really kind of spontaneous, one step at a time. I mean, planning is a form of power, I think. The ability to plan. And I never felt that, I just felt as if I was doing the best I could, day by day.”

What she built with those days, the endurance of more than 90 years of doing her best, turned into something truly extraordinary. As she got older, she remained dedicated to encouraging women to keep reaching for what might seem unattainable, and to draw on one another for strength. In addition to her many public events, she quietly invited women of all generations into her home for what she called “talking circles”: off-the-record conversations about everything from women in sports and women’s health to A.I. and sexual desire. It was her wish that these intimate gatherings would continue after her death, and that, with the help of her foundation, women writers and activists would continue to use her home as a space for the kind of work she struggled to do alone early in her career.

In those circles, she operated as a journalist: She spoke less than she listened, she urged the women to say more, to go deeper. She may have aspired once to be a woman of letters, to lead a more solitary life dedicated to the written word. But the time and the place she was born into did not have very many spaces like that for women. So again and again, she put aside her own comfort and her own literary aspirations and went out to do what she could to change the world.