September 3, 2026 — On September 2, 2026, the world lost Gloria Steinem: a groundbreaking feminist, a writer, a philosopher, and a singular leader in the global movement to secure equality for women and girls. For generations, Gloria was a feminist icon; she celebrated the label of feminist and rejected the one of icon. 

Those of us who marched alongside Gloria around the world admired her unyielding vision and optimism, qualities that sustained us in the maddening loop of progress and regression that defines the fight for women’s and girls’ rights.

For decades, Gloria was a stalwart supporter of the work of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), including serving as a member of our Advisory Council, advocating for stronger laws to protect women and girls from sexual exploitation and violence. She never shied away from calling out the institutions that betrayed the rights of women and girls and upheld the patriarchy, whether governments, corporations, or the media.

In our challenging work dedicated to ending sexual exploitation and the system of prostitution, Gloria offered us time and again, without flinching, the priceless gift of principled courage. 

“I cannot emphasize enough how important this realization is…Prostitution and sex trafficking are neither natural nor inevitable. They are functions of inequality combined with a false view of ‘masculinity.’ Prostitution is not the oldest profession, it is the oldest oppression,” Gloria said in a speech delivered in New Delhi in 2011.

With immense generosity and quiet passion, Gloria lent her formidable voice in many of CATW’s efforts to promote the rights of women and girls, including the 2015 campaign condemning Amnesty International’s resolution urging governments to decriminalize the sex trade. 

“I hope and believe that Amnesty will understand the parallels with other forms of economically compelled body invasion — for instance, the sale of organs,” she said. “The millions who are prostituted experience trauma and shortened lives. Legalization keeps pimps, brothel keepers, and sex-slavers in freedom and riches. Criminalization puts the prostituted in prison. What works is the ‘third way,’ the Nordic model, which offers services and alternatives to prostituted people, and fines buyers and educates them to the realities of the global sex trade.”

Gloria understood, with integrity and brilliant clarity, that as long as women can be sold in any marketplace, equality will remain elusive.

In 2017, Gloria, CATW, and NOW-NY rallied against a PornHub pop-up shop in New York City. “As long as porn is seen as synonymous with sex, people will defend it, but in fact, pornography is about power, not sex,” Gloria declared at the press conference. “We need to make the difference clear to save the lives and shared humanity of both men and women.”

In 2018, with our partner, the Frontline Women’s Fund, Gloria launched the Gloria Steinem Equality Fund to End Sex Trafficking, which supports grassroots women’s rights activists, including survivors, who advocate for the adoption of the “third way.”  

With support from Gloria’s Fund, frontline services organizations across the globe — from Argentina to Nepal to Nigeria — also invest in finding solutions to end the demand that drives the growth of the sex trade and to defend the human right not to be bought and sold.

Despite her stratospheric stardom, Gloria was known for her boundless kindness, empathy, and her steely insistence that what we are fighting for is not simple reform, but a revolution. 

“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood,” Gloria once said. 

CATW — and millions of women and girls around the world — are honored to be part of Gloria’s sisterhood. Dreaming of a better world, she often reminded us, is a form of planning, so onwards we march to reach equality and justice.