Gloria Steinem's death last week hit me harder than I expected.
She was 32 years older than I am, and when I was young, that felt like an entire generation. As part of that wave of girls and women fighting for opportunities in soccer during the 1980s, I can't honestly say I fully appreciated who she was or what she was doing. Part of that was the way she was talked about by some of the people around me. She was a "women's libber." A “troublemaker," and “opinionated.” Other people would say, "Right on!" I wasn't sure I wanted to get in the middle of any of it. I just wanted to play soccer.
It's funny how life changes your perspective.
One of Steinem's most famous lines was, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." I understand that far better today than I ever could have then.
Someone once told me that you don't really appreciate the people who opened doors until life forces you to walk through them. It's when you leave home, build a career, negotiate a salary, raise a family, or discover that opportunities still aren't distributed equally. That's when the things you never had to notice suddenly become impossible to ignore.
I've walked through so many of the doors Gloria Steinem helped open without even realizing she and others had fought to open them. That is the goal always for the trailblazers. In order to move forward, that fight can’t be forgotten.
Along the way, I also ran into barriers I didn't understand. When I retired from playing, I felt powerless in ways I hadn't expected. It seemed as though our history—the history of women who had fought, played, organized, and built—wasn’t being honored. Steinem never stopped insisting that history matters, because if we don't know where we've been, it's much easier for someone else to tell us we were never there.
Progress doesn't happen in a straight line. It happens because someone pushes a little farther than the generation before them, and someone else remembers to tell that story. She also insisted on keeping the torch she lit for herself, and for others, that we individually as well as collectively keep burning. So today, I just want to say thank you, Gloria. Thank you for opening doors that so many of us walked through before we even realized who had unlocked them.
