When I learned that Gloria Steinem had died, I found myself thinking not only about the woman she had been, but about the millions of women who had encountered themselves differently because she had insisted that their lives, choices, anger, intelligence, and freedom deserved to be taken seriously.
Gloria Steinem was a journalist, writer, organizer, and one of the most recognizable voices of the modern women’s movement. She co-founded Ms. magazine and helped build organizations that carried women’s experiences out of private rooms and into public debate. For more than half a century, she challenged the assumptions that had governed women’s lives: what we could become, how much freedom we could claim, and who possessed the authority to define us. She did not give women their voices – we had always possessed them, but she helped make those voices more difficult for the world to ignore.
Her death made me think about how much has changed because women like her refused to accept the world exactly as they found it. But it also made me think about how many old expectations remain, surviving not always as laws or explicit prohibitions, but as instructions for how a woman should carry herself in the world. While thinking about these questions, my mind turned from history to story, because sometimes fiction reveals the private cost of social expectations more intimately than history can.
Have you watched Greta Gerwig’s Little Women? I do not mean simply watched it as a beautiful film about four sisters growing up, loving one another, and finding their places in the world. Have you watched it as a meditation on the different lives women are permitted to want and on the price they may be asked to pay for wanting them?
Through the March sisters, the film refuses to suggest that there is only one courageous way to be a woman. Jo’s fierce determination to become a writer exists alongside her profound devotion to her family. Amy’s ambition does not make her incapable of love. Beth’s gentleness is never presented as an absence of strength, and Marmee’s compassion contains an anger she has spent a lifetime learning to govern. Each woman carries a different dream, and none can be reduced to a single quality or an approved version of womanhood.
What moved me most was not that these women were strong, but that their strength did not erase everything else they were. They could be ambitious and loving, angry and compassionate, independent and deeply connected to others. They did not have to become less human in order to become more powerful.
And that is when the image came to me: petals and armor.
I do not always know whether what I see in a woman is petals or armor, because the world has so often asked us to choose between the two and because, after years of learning how to survive without surrendering our tenderness, they can begin to look remarkably alike.
From an early age, we learn that strength is admired only when it knows how to make itself smaller, that confidence is welcome only when it does not disturb the existing order, and that courage is acceptable as long as it never makes anyone else uncomfortable. We are told to be strong enough to endure, but not strong enough to intimidate; to carry what is placed upon us, but to do so gracefully, and without allowing the weight to become visible. We see the lesson beginning in the girl who knows the answer but raises her hand only halfway, looking around the classroom before she speaks. “I may be wrong,” she says, although she is almost certain she is right. Years later, she enters a meeting carrying an idea she has worked on for weeks, yet introduces it with, “This may be a silly suggestion.” No one ever formally instructed her to disappear; instead, she was simply rewarded, little by little, for occupying less of herself.
We are also asked to be gentle, but not vulnerable; to understand everyone, forgive, absorb disappointment, and remain kind even when kindness is not returned. We must never reveal how deeply something has wounded us, because vulnerability is too easily mistaken for weakness. And so, we become skilled at making pain look like composure. We say, “I’m fine,” not because we are untouched, but because we have learned that the world is often more comfortable with our resilience than with the truth of what resilience has cost us.
We may pursue success, provided we remain grateful for whatever portion of it we are given. We may enter the room, but we should not take up too much space within it. We may have ideas, but must introduce them carefully; we may lead, but should make leadership appear effortless; we may know our value, but must express it in a way that never sounds as though we expect the world to recognize it. A woman’s ambition is often celebrated in principle and resisted the moment it acquires a voice, a boundary, or the audacity to say, “I have earned this.”
To tell the truth, this is a difficult, if not impossible, balance. We have been asked to become so many contradictory things at once that we sometimes mistake exhaustion for inadequacy. We believe we have failed when, in reality, the standard itself was designed to be unlivable. No one can be endlessly giving without becoming empty, perpetually strong without needing rest, entirely independent while remaining constantly available, or honest while ensuring that the truth never unsettles anyone.
Our wisdom is not in learning to perform these contradictions more perfectly, but in refusing to continue measuring ourselves by them. Underneath everything we have been told to be, each of us carries both the warrior and the wildflower.
We are warriors because life has asked us, again and again, to rise. Some battles unfolded in crowded rooms where we smiled while defending our dignity, while others took place in the stillness of the night, when no one could see how much courage it required simply to believe that morning might bring something better. Throughout our journeys, there were victories no one applauded because no one knew a battle had taken place…like the moment you stopped doubting what you knew, the day you walked away from what diminished you, or the first time you spoke the word “no” and did not follow it with an apology.
Warriors wear armor, but ours is not always visible. Sometimes it looks like composure; other times, it looks like a boundary or a silence where we once felt compelled to explain ourselves. Our armor was not given to us, but we fashioned it ourselves, piece by piece, from every experience that tried to teach us we were powerless.
But we are also wildflowers, alive in a way that refuses permission, unwilling to wait for perfect conditions and send our roots into difficult soil, finding light through the smallest opening, and blooming in places where no one imagined beauty could survive.
There is wisdom in understanding that we have always been both and that the armor and the petals are not opposites. One speaks of what we have survived; the other, of what we have refused to surrender. The armor is what we learned to wear; the petals are what we refused to lose… and the woman beneath them belongs, finally and entirely, to herself.
References (if you’d like to read more deeply in this theme)
Bowles, H. R., Babcock, L., & Lai, L. (2007). Social incentives for gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it does hurt to ask. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103(1), 84–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.09.001
Heilman, M. E., Caleo, S., & Manzi, F. (2024). Women at work: Pathways from gender stereotypes to gender bias and discrimination. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 11, 165–192. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-110721-034105
Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2001). Prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 743–762. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00239
