Tribute to Gloria Steinem
Student Leadership Network has lost a dear friend.
Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, journalist, and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, passed away earlier this month.
She was with us from the beginning. Gloria was one of the first people to visit The Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem, invited by our founder, Ann Tisch, 30 years ago. She expected nothing new. Instead, watching girls seated in a circle, learning from each other instead of facing a teacher’s back, brought her to tears. “I would have loved to have this,” she said.
Gloria’s belief that girls deserve an education built around them, not around what others expect of them, is the belief this organization still stands on.
We’re grateful for her, and we will carry her example forward.
This excerpt from Gloria Steinem is from Student Leadership Network’s book, “It’s All About the Girls.”
I was among the first people to visit the first The Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem. Ann had invited me and so I wanted to go. But I thought I knew it all already, because this was my life, this was my work, and I really didn’t think I was going to learn anything new. I just wanted to pay a visit of respect and support.
When I started to walk around the school and saw the classrooms weren’t militaristic, with everybody looking at each other’s back and the teacher looking at you, but that the tables in the science lab were all round so you could sit and learn from each other, it brought tears to my eyes because I thought, “I would have loved to have this!”
From day one (and now 25 years later) the impact of TYWLS has been extraordinary. They not only ignited an all-girls public school movement across the United States, they changed the public education landscape. For the past 25 years, because of TYWLS schools and their national affiliates, young women from some of the poorest communities in the country—who are too often made invisible by society—are not only being seen, they are being heard.
They are on their way to college and into the world to become doctors, lawyers, scientists, bankers, politicians, and tech gurus. As Student Leadership Network knows, education is the way to change the balance of power and leadership. And as Ann Tisch says, education is the great equalizer!
