You Know Gloria Steinem. Now Meet Dorothy Pitman Hughes.

Send us Fan MailKaren opens with a photograph. Two women, fists raised, 1971, one of the most reproduced images of the feminist movement. Everyone can name Gloria Steinem. Almost nobody can name Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Black organizer standing beside her. Gloria Steinem died on September 3, 2026, and in the wave of tributes, that image ran everywhere with one name attached to it. Karen traces how the two women met: Pitman Hughes came to New York from Lumpkin, Georgia at nineteen, sang in nightclubs, cleaned houses, and built a multiracial cooperative childcare center on West 80th Street with no funding and no resources. Steinem, then a young magazine columnist, came to write about the center. They toured the country together for years. The press printed one of them. From there, the conversation widens into the four waves of feminism, from Seneca Falls in 1848 through the 19th Amendment that left most Black women unable to vote until 1965, through Betty Friedan and the Redstockings and Shulamith Firestone, through Anita Hill and Kimberlé Crenshaw naming intersectionality, to Tarana Burke and Me Too. Jonelle interrupts twice to ask whether a claim is fact or projection, and once to name that Karen's framing of Steinem sounded like white saviorism. She brings up Latarsha Sanders alongside Lindsay Clancy: two mothers, the same county, the same judge, and only one set of medical records allowed into a courtroom. The episode lands where Karen started it. Learning the name is step one. Repeating it is the work.CALLS TO ACTIONPick one idea you repeated this week and find out who said it first. One search. Then say both names the next time it comes up.Look up the 1971 Dan Wynn portrait in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery collection and read the caption. Notice which name it leads with.Put one book by a Black woman historian in your stack before book club. Martha S. Jones's Vanguard is the one this episode keeps walking into.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] Notes: In '69, Redstockings speak out, and Steinem's own account of it comes from the Redstockings Archive for Action and Documented History. The story of Dorothy Pitman Hughes comes from historian Laura Lovett's biography, With Her Fist Raised. The Firestone material is drawn from The Dialectic of Sex itself. Tributes to Gloria Steinem are from NPR and CNN.Support the show