By Erin Grau
Updated September 15, 2026
Gloria Steinem and I were in the back of a taxi crawling slowly up the FDR highway, coming home from a holiday party downtown, when our conversation inevitably drifted to my daughters, Matilda and Frankie. In the casual, effortless way she could deliver something utterly profound, Gloria looked at me and explained that my fundamental job as a parent is to discover who they truly are.
There is something inherently amusing about receiving parenting advice from a legendary feminist icon who never had children of her own, yet there is also something profoundly correct about receiving that kind of wisdom in the back of a New York City taxi. Gloria famously loved to discover a new city by taxi, chatting with drivers and seeking the unique perspective that only a local could provide. She wrote extensively about that practice in her memoir, My Life on the Road, which happens to be the very book she signed for my daughters the first time I ever met her. When I told her their names that day, her face lit up, and she immediately began imagining out loud “the adventures of Matilda and Frankie.”
Years later, as one of the inaugural residents of her foundation, I spent many afternoons sitting in Gloria’s living room, working at the vital intersection of women, artificial intelligence, and power. One afternoon, I brought Matilda along. Over cups of hot chocolate and holiday cookies, Gloria shared her deep, lifelong love of Louisa May Alcott. As Matilda cradled Gloria’s treasured first edition copy of Little Women, Gloria kept her hand protectively over her heart. In her lap rested the Christmas present my daughters had carefully picked out for her: a miniature yellow taxi ornament for her holiday tree.
Seeing the World Through Our Daughters’ Eyes
Little Women was Gloria’s favorite book as a girl, a novel that fundamentally shaped her worldview. It was a story about who gets to earn, who gets to decide, and who gets to want something for herself.
Stories were always paramount to Gloria. Facts, she often noted, are easy to forget, but stories stay with us. They demand that we stand in someone else’s life and imagine entirely new worlds.
Gloria always met Matilda right where she was, mirroring the way she met every person in her life. She possessed a genuine love for children, and seeing her interact with mine made me understand why. Children, by their very nature, are natural philosophers. They do not accept the way things are today as an immutable destiny; instead, they ask why things are structured the way they are and what else they could possibly become. Gloria lived her entire life with that exact same inquisitive spirit.
To truly discover who my children are, I realized I needed to borrow Gloria’s curiosity. That meant asking more questions, listening much more closely, and practicing a greater depth of empathy—an emotion she steadfastly believed was fundamentally radical.
If my first lesson from Gloria on the art of motherhood was to discover who my daughters are, the second was to tackle the heavy, necessary work of building a world that genuinely deserves them.
Creating a World Worthy of Their Adventures
Gloria lived long enough to witness the cultural backlash against the hard-won achievements of the feminist movement, as well as the contemporary, renewed celebration of the traditional wife and mother. Family, Gloria once told me, is all too often the birthplace of inequality. Yet whenever we discussed the cyclical nature of societal progress and regression, she never treated either direction as permanent. She remarked once that history would be entirely boring otherwise.
Gloria gave me explicit permission to feel angry at a world that still falls so tragically short of true equality, while still holding fiercely onto hope. Her truest, most enduring wish was that we simply keep doing the work. Activist Amy Richards, her close friend and longtime collaborator, often refers to this dedication as a beautiful responsibility.
I believe Gloria’s greatest wish for me in the back of that taxi last December was a world that actually fits Matilda and Frankie—now ages 12 and 9—and everything they hope for themselves, rather than a world where girls are expected to shrink themselves to fit in.
Just a few days after Gloria passed away, my daughters and I took a taxi directly to her Manhattan apartment. We brought along a copy of Little Women, placing it among the hundreds of floral tributes left outside her door. Frankie wrote the note: a simple, heartfelt, “Thank you, Gloria.”
Together, we took to the sidewalk with chalk. Near a massive heart inscribed with the words, “We shall walk in your light,” Matilda drew her best yellow taxicab alongside a portrait of Gloria wearing her iconic aviator glasses, while Frankie carefully sketched a book until she got the details just right. We paused to read some of the other cards left to honor and thank Gloria. Around us, other mothers stood on the sidewalk with their daughters, sharing quiet, knowing nods and subtle smiles of solidarity.
Then, we headed out across town, stepping directly into Gloria’s unfinished business, with my daughters running ahead of me. The adventures of Matilda and Frankie.
