Gloria Steinem speaks on the DMZ Discussion board in September 2019. (courtesy Christine Ahn)
On Sept. 2, 2026, the feminist creator and activist Gloria Steinem handed away at her residence in New York at 92. Most will bear in mind Gloria’s lifelong contributions to ladies’s rights. Few will know her legacy in Korea.
She was an icon to hundreds of thousands. My nickname for her was “Tremendous” — extra like a constructing tremendous with a large set of keys that opened doorways. She spent actual political capital, and used a lot of these keys, to advance peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Gloria and I clicked the second we first spoke in 2011 over our effort to cease the naval base on Jeju Island. She had simply returned from Gangjeong, and I had been supporting the protesting villagers from afar. We printed back-to-back op-eds in The New York Occasions, bringing world consideration to their plight. Once I later discovered I used to be pregnant with a daughter, Gloria instructed me the spirit of Jeju — the island of peace and ladies — was in my womb. I named my daughter Jeju.
In October 2013, I wrote to ask whether or not Gloria would be a part of a ladies’s peace stroll throughout the demilitarized zone to name for an finish to the Korean Struggle. Inside an hour, she wrote again: “Sure — my highschool classmates went to battle there.” She needed to assist deliver therapeutic and closure to the Korean Struggle.
With Gloria on board, I traveled with Hye-Jung Park to Pyongyang in February 2014 and returned with the DPRK’s approval for a ladies’s peace symposium and DMZ crossing. A yr of organizing adopted as we assembled a 30-member worldwide ladies’s delegation, and Gloria was current for almost all of it.
Gloria Steinem (fourth from left, entrance row) and the creator (fifth from left), throughout a Ladies Cross DMZ occasion in 2015. (Lee Jong-keun/Hankyoreh)
The more durable activity was profitable approval from a cautious South Korean authorities below President Park Geun-hye, at a time when any engagement with the North carried actual political threat. That is the place Gloria’s many years of expertise and in depth community proved indispensable. She reached out to Jan Eliasson, then the UN’s deputy secretary-general, asking him to assist ship a letter to President Park requesting permission for the worldwide ladies “to cross the DMZ in order that we could function a human bridge uniting Korean ladies and peoples.” Eliasson referred to as it “an attention-grabbing, even spectacular, challenge,” however Park by no means responded.
Because the seventieth anniversary of Korea’s division approached, we tried the media as a substitute. With the UN Command’s approval secured by the late Governor Invoice Richardson, we introduced our crossing at a press convention on the United Nations Correspondents Affiliation on March 11, 2015, lined by The New York Occasions.
“I consider it’s essential that girls assist provoke and pursue peace efforts,” Gloria mentioned. “We don’t have ‘masculinity’ to show, and so it’s generally simpler for us to make connections with different ladies throughout divisions.”
By way of the stroll itself — from Beijing to Pyongyang to Kaesong to Dorasan Station to Seoul — Gloria was our steadying presence, serving to us keep united and on message. On the eve of our crossing, Gloria wrapped her arms round me and jogged my memory we had gotten three governments to agree on our crossing once they might agree on nothing else. When hostile press met us at Dorasan Station, she mentioned, “Christine is the heroine of this group, we should always all be thanking her!” As I confronted deportation and threats, she shielded me then as she so typically did.
Gloria’s involvement continued lengthy after. She addressed Congress and the United Nations. In 2017 and once more in 2024, when Presidents Park and Yoon — each since impeached and imprisoned — banned me from getting into South Korea, Gloria was the primary to make calls and challenge statements in my protection.
Gloria Steinem and different peace activists with the Statue of Peace in Seoul. (courtesy Christine Ahn)
That very same yr, amid Trump’s “fireplace and fury” towards Pyongyang, Gloria related us to his incoming nationwide safety advisor on Asia, Matt Pottinger, whom she’d identified since he was a boy as a result of she had dated his father, Stan, who was a high-ranking Justice Division official within the Nineteen Seventies. Pottinger met members of our Korea peace motion, together with relations of Korean Struggle POW/MIAs, and obtained our letter to President Trump, signed by ladies from greater than 40 nations, together with North and South Korea, urging him to defuse tensions and work for peace on the Korean Peninsula.
In 2019, Gloria and I co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Put up, “Ladies marched for Korean reconciliation. Washington is in our means.” That yr we returned to South Korea, the place she delivered the keynote on the DMZ Peace Discussion board. She hosted our motion at her brownstone, reviewed our statements, raised funds, and made calls when it mattered.
Our friendship went past activism; Gloria helped me discover my very own private liberation. As soon as, I referred to as Gloria in tears earlier than boarding a flight as a result of I felt responsible about leaving my younger daughter Jeju. Gloria mentioned Jeju would know me as somebody who pursued her desires, and be formed by watching her dad prepare dinner, clear, and take care of her. And once I struggled to finish my marriage, she instructed me it was essential for me to mannequin the connection I needed Jeju to see and to have in the future herself.
Many of the obituaries will, rightly, dwell on Gloria’s function in constructing the American feminist motion. Few will point out Korea. However she herself thought of the DMZ crossing among the many most significant acts of her life. In 2019, she wrote, “One of the rewarding issues I’ve ever executed in my life was a Peace Stroll Throughout the DMZ between North and South Korea, along with 30 ladies leaders from around the globe.”
The Korean Struggle stays unfinished, 73 years after the armistice. Gloria Steinem believed ladies might assist end it. That work is now ours to hold on.
Gloria Steinem and Christine Ahn, together with Ahn’s daughter, Jeju. (courtesy Christine Ahn)
By Christine Ahn, a fellow on the Institute for Coverage Research and the founding father of Ladies Cross DMZ
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