“Early on, she understood that the legal and political fights, the policy fights, that we were having, they were really cultural conversations around who we were as a country, and she leaned in,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center.

Steinem was someone “who often spoke very deliberately to the relationships between different types of women and she spoke about what it looks like to create intentional solidarity,” Goss Graves said. “She named both a historical and present-day effort to leave Black women out, even though they were the fuel of so many of our movements and so much of our politics.”

Goss Graves said Steinem deeply studied the suffrage movement — and learned from it the value of building coalition with Black women, whose efforts and aspirations had been cast aside generations earlier.

“She talked a lot about the mistakes that were made all around and that when the suffrage movement and abolition movement worked together in solidarity, they were more powerful. And when they were divided, those divisions were exploited and they were less powerful. She was a student of that history and worked to implement it in real time.”