What a wretched time for Gloria Steinem to die.

Had Steinem, an icon of second-wave feminism, left us a decade ago, the arc of her life would have seemed one of unequivocal triumph. Steinem began her career at a time when abortion was illegal and male domination largely unquestioned. Moving to New York in 1960, she had a hard time finding an apartment on her own: “Landlords felt single women were not financially responsible, and if you could earn enough, you must be a hooker,” she once said. In 1969, the year she wrote her first piece about women’s liberation, there was one woman in the Senate, a widow who’d succeeded her husband. Until 1971, the year Steinem helped launch Ms. Magazine, women still weren’t allowed to join the National Press Club.

By September 2016, the world Steinem helped so many women imagine seemed closer than ever. Steinem’s friend Hillary Clinton was widely expected to become the next president. Feminist journalism was flourishing in unexpected places, including Teen Vogue. “There is a changed consciousness now,” she said in a speech in 2016.

But Steinem has died at the end of a decade that undid some of what she struggled for. We are ruled by a thuggish cabal of cartoon misogynists. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited a pastor who wants to repeal women’s suffrage to give a sermon at the Pentagon. The right to abortion has been lost, and there’s a growing call among anti-abortion activists to imprison women who terminate their pregnancies. Some big companies, including Zoom and Deloitte, are rolling back parental leave. Alex Karp, head of the tech surveillance behemoth Palantir, openly fantasizes that A.I. will eliminate jobs done largely by educated women and thus reduce their power in society.

At such a dark moment for gender equality, there’s something particularly bittersweet about the outpouring of encomiums to Steinem that have followed her death. We have no way of knowing if we’re living through a momentary backlash to the causes she championed or a new age of barbarism that will stamp out even more of the freedoms she helped win. But the bleakness of our time makes her example more important than ever. She didn’t vanquish crude sexism, but she was part of a movement that made it marginal, at least for a while. If it was done before, it can be done again.

Steinem’s emphasis on women building flesh-and-blood networks seems particularly significant right now. She once wrote that consciousness-raising groups, where women gathered weekly to talk about their lives, “gave feminism its heart, depth and most lasting legacies.” Even as consciousness-raising fell out of fashion, Steinem continued to believe that there was no substitute for organizing in the real world. In that 2016 speech, she said, “Something happens when we are together in a room like this with all five senses, that cannot happen on the printed page — as much as I love books — that cannot happen on a screen.” Often she turned her Upper East Side apartment into a feminist salon.

In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, women had to meet in the real world if they were going to meet at all. But I don’t think we can separate the vicious anti-feminist reaction we’re enduring from the fact that so much of our public life is mediated by toxic, isolating algorithms. Steinem, who started her career as a journalist, helped show women how to breach a hostile media. Her descendants have what is in some ways an even greater challenge, which is how to operate within a hostile media delivery system.

I recently read Jon Ronson’s new book, “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.” It’s about why so many men seem unmoored, and often the internet is a big part of the answer. Ronson describes an online course for aspiring YouTubers that teaches, “Opposition and conflict are what bring people together. They cause your community to link arms and identify with you.” The instructor told Ronson, “The unfortunate thing is it only works if it continues to push the boundaries, increasing the vilification of the nonbeliever.”

This dynamic has proved deeply destructive to feminism. Social media’s rage-based economy led contemporary feminism to rip itself apart internally with ever-escalating purity tests. At the same time, it fueled the rise of the manosphere, where enterprising creators learned they could make their names both channeling and exacerbating their audience’s resentments. The algorithms built to keep people attached to their devices are inimical to social progress and a terrible substitute for human connection. A workable strategy to escape from the dystopia these algorithms have helped create can be built only outside of them.

This is something that the Democratic Socialists of America seems to grasp. The movement has grown powerful not just because of its ideology, but because its constant roster of events — soccer leagues, running clubs, standup comedy nights — offers an antidote to a culture plagued by loneliness and atomization. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign became, for some New Yorkers, a rich social world in addition to a political cause.

Second-wave feminism once had that quality, and Steinem often said she wanted to recapture it. In the afterword to her 1992 book “Revolution From Within,” Steinem dreamed of a “national honeycomb” of small groups, at once personal and political, that would provide the social infrastructure for a revitalized feminism. She saw Alcoholics Anonymous as a model. “If two white male alcoholics could start a national network of meetings that are free, leaderless and accessible,” she wrote, “so can we.”