Gloria Steinem's Living Room Talking Circles Fostered Connection and Activism

I can't stop thinking about Gloria Steinem's living room. For years, Steinem gathered people in her New York City brownstone and asked them to sit together, without a head of the table, without hierarchy. She called them "Talking Circles."

She said the practice was inspired in part by Indigenous traditions of gathering in a circle, something Steinem wrote about in her 2015 memoir "My Life on the Road." As a journalist and author focused on human connection and social health, that part of the book always stayed with me.

"I was struck by how open and accessible she was," Ann Shoket, CEO of a community of women and nonbinary leaders called TheLi.st, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday after finding out the feminist icon had died at 92. "She was also deeply real," said Shoket, who tells me she mingled in Steinem's living room twice at events held in recent months. "She made us all dream bigger."

The conversations that took place in those circles would change lives in ways large and small. It's where plans for Ms. Magazine and the nonprofit Women's Media Center started to take shape. And frequently, it was the space Steinem offered to organizations like Third Wave, Equality Now and Direct Impact Africa to plan their next steps, marking "turning points" in their work, according to Gloria's Foundation.

Much of the power of Steinem's living room was that it cracked open opportunities to lend support, let ideas flow and build trust face-to-face. It fostered moments of welcome connection for decades, most recently in an era when nearly three-quarters of adults spend time with people they care about only twice a month or less, and about two-thirds say they never participate in clubs or organizations.

"Gloria was very interested in intergenerational connection," Soraya Chemaly, author of "All We Want is Everything" and board member of the Women's Media Center, tells me. "She listened to young women who sat in her living room, never talking down to them, always validating," says Chemaly, who estimates that she was a guest in Steinem's living room nearly a dozen times. "She built community and solidarity in a low-key and comfortable space."