Feminist writer and activist Gloria Steinem dedicated her life to advocating for women and girls. And yet, in the latter part of her life, she told Terry Gross that she had entered a new phase in life, one free of the “demands of gender” that she had faced starting in adolescence.

“Remember when you were 9 or 10 and you were this independent little girl climbing trees and saying, ‘I know what I want, I know what I think’?” Steinem said in a 2015 Fresh Air interview. “That was before gender descended for most of us.”

“Ironically, I found by 60 you’re free again. So you’re the same person you were at 9 or 10, only now you have your own apartment, you can reach the light switch, you hopefully have a little money. So you can do what you want,” Steinem explained.

Steinem, who died Sept. 2, was the voice, and often the most identifiable face, of women’s liberation for more than half a century. An early contributor to New York magazine, in 1971, she co-founded Ms., the first national magazine to center feminist voices. That same year, she also co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment and encouraged more women to run for public office.

Later in life, Steinem continued to speak out about the political, social and economic barriers to women’s rights. She cited violence against women and the fight for reproductive rights as two of the most important issues facing women today.

“The definition of patriarchy is to be able to control reproduction, and that means you have to control women’s bodies,” she said. “It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in.”

Steinem spoke to Fresh Air in 1987, 1992 and 2015. This interview is a compilation of those conversations.

Interview Highlights

On co-founding Ms., a magazine written by and devoted to women

Even before I began to think about anything that might be called feminism or to question the structures that women encountered, I and lots of women could not write about political subjects for the existing magazines. We were thought to be the experts on, you know, food, makeup, babies and celebrities. But that was pretty much it. And though I railed against it, as many other women did, perhaps not hard enough in retrospect — but at least we tried — it really didn’t budge very much. …