One evening , thirty odd years ago, I was watching Gloria Steinem drift through a crowded lecture hall when I overheard a scientist ask her colleague, “What exactly is it that she does?” A question to which the colleague replied, “It’s not what she does, it’s what she arouses in others.” It has taken me all these years to understand that exchange.

We were more than twenty years into the women’s movement at that point and Steinem had long been the representative face of a generation of feminists that included intellectual heavyweights like Kate Millett, Ellen Willis, Betty Friedan, and Susan Brownmiller. I remember thinking even then that it was a measure of America’s anxiety over liberationist movements that it was the pretty girl among us who had become the movement’s emblematic figure.…