Gloria Steinem, My Mom & Opening Windows

By Lane Byrum
Director of Corporate Accounts & Emotional Intelligence Coach
SHIFT Company

When I learned that Gloria Steinem had died, an unexpected memory came rushing back. I remembered my mother explaining to me who Gloria Steinem was.

It would have been sometime in the 1980s. I was young, growing up in Georgia and attending the fairly conservative church I grew up in. Gloria Steinem wasn’t exactly required reading in my world. But apparently my mother had other ideas.

She talked to me about Steinem, the women’s movement and the fight for equality. She wanted me to understand why women like Gloria had challenged so many of the assumptions about the roles women were expected to play in their homes, workplaces and communities.

Looking back now, I realize my mother wasn’t simply giving me a history lesson. She was opening a window.

My mom believed deeply in women’s rights, although those beliefs existed alongside her own Southern, conservative upbringing and the traditional church in which we were raising our family. I imagine there were times when those worlds fit together rather uneventfully. There were other times when they most certainly did not.

I remember our pastor publishing an article in the church paper about men being the heads of their households and women being called to submit to them. My mother was having none of it. She challenged him about what he had written and the message it was sending.

It did not go particularly well. Somewhere along the way, my mom became known in certain circles of our church as “that women’s rights lady.” I suspect she wore the designation better than the people bestowing it intended. 

What I’ve come to appreciate is that my mother’s beliefs about equality weren’t theoretical. She wasn’t interested only in discussing whether women deserved equal treatment. When she encountered inequity, she did something about it.

At one point in her career, she discovered that women at her workplace weren’t receiving the same number of vacation days as men at the same level and with similar experience. So my mother did what “that women’s rights lady” apparently did when something didn’t make sense to her: she started asking questions. Then she gathered names on a petition and challenged the policy.

Equality wasn’t merely something she believed. It was something she practiced. But as I’ve reflected on her since hearing about Gloria Steinem’s death, I realize there was another part of what my mother gave me that may have mattered even more. She wanted her son to keep his mind open.

She knew what I was hearing at church. She knew the worldview being presented to me each week. Faith was an important part of our family, but she seemed determined that the particular version of faith I encountered there would never become a wall around my curiosity.

So she opened windows. Gloria Steinem was one of them.

She told me about her friends who were gay. She talked to me about equality across gender and race. She was willing to have conversations about sex, love, relationships and power that weren’t always neatly aligned with what we were hearing on Sunday mornings.

Most importantly, when I offered some young opinion that she probably considered spectacularly misguided, she often resisted the temptation to simply tell me so.

She got curious. She asked me questions. She listened. She tried to understand why I thought what I thought. Then she might offer another perspective and invite me to look at the issue differently.

I didn’t have language for what she was doing then. I do now. She was practicing empathy.

Not the watered-down definition of empathy that means being nice to everyone. And certainly not the increasingly common misconception that understanding someone requires agreeing with them.

Responsible empathy is much more demanding than that. It asks us to become curious about how another human being came to see the world the way they do. It asks us to temporarily suspend our judgment—not necessarily discard it—and listen long enough to understand an experience we haven’t lived ourselves.

In essence, empathy says, “Come look through this window with me.”

I’ve spent a significant portion of my professional life studying and teaching empathy. I’ve helped develop frameworks around it and coached leaders to practice it. I’ve watched what happens inside organizations, families and relationships when people stop trying to win long enough to genuinely understand one another.

Yet I’m increasingly aware that some of my earliest lessons in empathy happened long before I knew the word would become so important to me. They happened in conversations with my mother.

She taught me that you can have strong convictions without closing your mind. You can challenge something you believe is wrong without stripping dignity from the person on the other side. You can believe something deeply without requiring everyone around you to believe it, too. And perhaps most importantly, you can love someone enough to help them see beyond the boundaries of the world they’ve inherited.

I think that’s what my mother was doing when she told me about Gloria Steinem all those years ago. She wasn’t telling me that I had to agree with everything Gloria believed. She was making sure I knew Gloria existed. She wanted me to understand why her voice mattered and why millions of women had found something important in what she was saying.

She was making sure that the male-dominated perspective surrounding much of my childhood wasn’t the only window through which her son would learn to see women, equality, relationships, love and power. That’s a hell of a gift to give a kid.

And now, decades later, Gloria Steinem’s death has made me think about how ideas and influence travel from one human being to another.

Gloria never knew my mother. My mother never could have known exactly what I would do with the things she was teaching me during those conversations. Yet Steinem’s advocacy helped shape conversations about equality that reached women like my mother. My mother carried those ideas into her workplace, where she challenged unequal treatment. She carried them into her church, where she refused to quietly accept that being a woman made her subordinate. And she carried them home to her son.

And now that son spends a significant part of his life encouraging other people to become curious about experiences different from their own.

There is something humbling about that realization.

We tend to think about legacy in terms of what someone leaves behind with their name attached to it. Books. Buildings. Foundations. Awards. Movements. But perhaps some of the most consequential parts of our lives will never carry our names.

They’ll live in people. A belief we challenged. A question we asked. A person we encouraged. A prejudice we interrupted. A child we taught to look at another human being with curiosity rather than judgment. And then those people carry some small piece of us into their relationships with others.

That’s how ideas travel. That’s how empathy travels. That’s how change happens.

Gloria Steinem never knew that decades after my mother first explained to me who she was, her death would cause me to remember those conversations. My mother never could have known that her willingness to open those windows would eventually become connected to the work her son would choose to do with his own life.

But here I am. And I find myself thinking about something my mother understood long before I did:

We don’t have to tell our children—or one another—exactly what they should see.

Sometimes our most important job is simply to make sure they have enough windows.

I’m grateful my mother kept opening them for me. And I’m still trying to keep them open for others.

Leadership is an inside-out journey. At SHIFT Company(opens in new tab), we believe that when people grow, teams grow. And when teams grow, organizations thrive. That’s why we partner with organizations to develop leaders at every stage of their journey—through executive coaching, team coaching, and workshops on Empathy, Storytelling, and the Enneagram in Business.

Whether you’re investing in a single leader or transforming an entire leadership team, we’ll meet you where you are and help you take the next meaningful step. If you’d like to explore what’s possible for your leaders or organization, I’d love to start a conversation.  Please reach out to me at [email protected].