Gloria Steinem Dies In The Middle Of Her Life, At 92

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

She admits that she didn’t coin the phrase.  But she probably did more to popularize it (and its paraphrase, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”)

I am talking, of course, about the one and only Gloria Steinem.  Please indulge me that one cliche: She was not only one-of-a-kind; I truly believe that it’s simply not possible for this world, let alone the human race, to produce anyone else like her.

Yesterday she passed away, age 92.

I remember my disbelief when hearing that she was 80 years old. She seemed to be as much in the middle of her life as she was decades earlier. Perhaps it came from living and working for the causes she championed  with the knowledge that even when a policy changed, a new law passed or people (some, anyway) changed the way they thought, her work would never end. She clearly never forgot the struggles she faced while growing up (her father died when she was 11) or as a young woman trying to make her way in male-dominated spheres.

Her body has ceased to function. But her legacy hasn’t, in spite of Trump’s (and his allies’) attempts to destroy it. That is why she will always be in the middle of her life: the only possible, let alone proper, way to remember her.