Gloria Steinem’s NYC apartment: Where feminism found a home

The world lost Gloria Steinem this week. For more than six decades, she was one of the fiercest and most enduring voices for women’s equality and human rights. A journalist, author, organizer and activist, she lived through some of the most turbulent periods in modern American history and spent much of that life challenging the idea that inequality, discrimination or injustice should simply be accepted as the way things are. She helped give women language for experiences they were told to keep private. She helped create places for their voices to be heard. She fought, organized, wrote, listened and kept showing up, even when the battles were difficult and the progress painfully, and sometimes agonizingly, slow. I’m certain there will be many poignant retrospectives about Gloria Steinem’s extraordinary life. But for those of us in this industry who believe fervently that a home is so much more than walls and a roof, there may be another way to understand her legacy. Look at the house she built. Not physically, of course. The 19th-century brownstone on Manhattan’s East Side was standing long before Gloria arrived. But what happened after she walked through its doors is a remarkable r...