Gloria Steinem, who died last week at 92 , will be remembered as the face of the American women’s movement.

There is another way to read her life that belongs in the pages of a business publication: she was one of the most consequential entrepreneurs of her generation.

Consider the record. In 1963, she was a freelance writer — a solopreneur before the word existed — hustling for assignments in a media industry that handed women the fashion and food beats. Her undercover exposé of the Playboy Club made her famous, but it also taught her a lesson every founder eventually learns: the existing market might have no place for what she wanted to make. So she built new ones.

In 1968, she helped launch New York Magazine as a founding editor. In 1971 , she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Action Alliance.

That December , she and her co-founders inserted a sample issue of a new magazine — Ms. — into New York Magazine’s pages. It contained articles on topics including same-sex love and women’s reproductive rights. Gloria herself wrote a piece on sisterhood. Cofounding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote about raising children without gender roles. Jane O’Reilly commented on the universal experience of being seen as a housewife : “In the end, we are all housewives, the natural people to turn to when there is something unpleasant, inconvenient or inconclusive to be done.” (This is a sentiment that resonates still today to me, even as an unmarried woman who has no children.)

The next month, a January 1972 preview issue of Ms. ran a two-page petition titled “We Have Had Abortions,” signed by 53 prominent American women, including Billie Jean King, Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, Judy Collins, and Steinem herself, declaring they’d undergone abortions when the procedure was illegal in most states. It followed the model of a 1971 manifesto signed by 343 prominent French women. The petition ran a year before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States. The Washington Post later credited it with launching one of the movement’s most powerful strategies: ending the secrecy that had kept many women out of the fight. It’s a strategy that still resonates — from Congresswomen sharing their abortion stories on the House floor to #ShoutYourAbortion , the 2015 viral campaign of women publicly sharing their own abortion stories in response to proposed legislation to defund Planned Parenthood.

According to JSTOR Daily , Ms. promised “a how-to magazine for the liberated female human being — not how to make jelly but how to seize control of your life.”

At this time, the advertising industry was convinced that no woman would buy a magazine without recipes in it. This was the business model. As Steinem later documented in her 1990 essay “Sex, Lies & Advertising,” food advertisers demanded that women’s magazines run recipes and entertaining features — ideally ones mentioning their products. That’s why women’s magazines looked the way they did. Ms.’s own ad sales staff uncovered that executives often didn’t believe women made big-ticket purchasing decisions at all, let alone that feminists would welcome food and makeup ads.

Readers proved the advertisers wrong immediately — the preview issue of Ms. sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days, and generated 26,000 subscription orders plus some 20,000 reader letters within weeks. Steinem’s own telling adds the nice detail that the “Spring 1972” cover date was chosen so it could sit on newsstands for months — instead it was gone in eight days.

Months later, when the first regular issue hit newsstands in July 1972, it sold out quickly as well. A copy of the magazine resides in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History collection. It was markedly more provocative than the sample and preview issues. The cover featured a cartoon image of a giant Wonder Woman walking over an urban setting, under the banner “Wonder Woman for President.” Steinem said she chose the female superhero partly as a response to DC Comics’ recent choice to strip Wonder Woman’s powers. (Soon after, the character’s powers were restored.) The issue featured an essay about the history of Wonder Woman and her role in inspiring feminism, an article from Steinem on women’s voting patterns, and myriad other articles about the monetary value of housework, the limitations of sex manuals, and the politics of body hair.

The establishment’s verdict was unanimous — and proven wrong by the magazine’s resilience. “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say,” ABC anchor Harry Reasoner predicted — an assessment he would formally retract years later, once the magazine’s staying power had embarrassed it. Even the White House weighed in: Nixon’s secret tapes captured the president crudely dismissing the magazine to Henry Kissinger. The men most certain Ms. would fail were, not coincidentally, the men whose world it was built to challenge.

The advertisers never caught up, either. Ms. paid for its refusal in nearly two decades of financial precarity, and in 1989 — after advertisers fled a cover story on the 1989 Supreme Court Webster decision curbing abortion rights — the magazine folded, relaunching the following year without ads , supported by its readers instead.

The demand was never in question. The category just hadn’t been built to hold it.

That is the founder’s playbook, executed decades before we had the vocabulary: see the gap the incumbents insist isn’t there, test the idea, and let your audience make the argument advertisers wouldn’t.

In 1973, with Marlo Thomas, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Patricia Carbine, she created the Ms. Foundation for Women — the nation’s first women’s foundation, and in effect a new category of philanthropy: by the Foundation’s own count, it became the blueprint for hundreds of local and regional women’s funds that followed. It was the Ms. Foundation that gave America “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” in 1993 .

The Women’s Media Center followed, co-founded with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan in 2005, when she was 71 — an age at which most founders have long since retired to the advisory board.

Her final memoir, An Unexpected Life , arrives from Random House on September 22, twenty days after her death. She was, in the words of the statement announcing her death , “working for equality until the very end.”

I first met her in 1997, as a student at Wellesley College, and was fortunate to cross paths with her several times over the years, most recently at a ForbesWomen summit in the UAE in 2023.

But the conversation I return to the most happened on a Zoom call on October 26, 2020. During the call, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court, which all of us knew meant the reversal of Roe vs. Wade was imminent. We were all despondent and frustrated. Someone asked Gloria: “how can we stay optimistic when it feels like the world is moving backwards?”

She put us in our place. The law had been wrong for most of her life, she reminded us. She grew up under segregation. She had to travel to another country to access an abortion. Women could not open their own bank accounts until she was well into adulthood — the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974, when she was 40.

Progress takes time, she said. Keep fighting.

Every one of us should sit with that answer. Sometimes the ventures that matter most are the ones built against consensus, on timelines that outlast any single funding cycle or news cycle. Steinem operated on a fifty-year horizon. Her returns were not exits but altered defaults: the honorific “Ms.” on every form we fill out, the assumption that a woman’s byline can anchor a magazine, the expectation that we and our daughters will hold our own credit cards and ambitions.

Steinem resisted being called the face of feminism, insisting the movement grew from the bottom, like a tree. She always insisted it was about all of us. Every time I met her, she was deeply curious about me and what was driving me at that moment and about the women around us as well. She would probably resist the label of entrepreneur, too. But the institutions she founded — a magazine, a foundation, a media center, a political caucus — are still standing, still staffed, still compounding.

Most startups don’t survive their founders’ attention spans, let alone their founders.

She famously said “the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” That anger, converted into institutions, is as good a definition of entrepreneurship as any I know.