In February, Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force’s Co-Founder and Director, gathered with about 15 other women in New York City at Gloria Steinhem’s “magical house” for a “climate talking circle.” Today, as the world mourns the loss of the storied women’s rights movement leader who died at 92, Dominque told People magazine about the once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“She had the power of her life and her experience and her wisdom, but also she still had huge curiosity,” Dominique recalls. People notes that the intimate gathering—a salon of sorts—harkened back to Gloria Steinem’s history of organizing women like this.
“That was deeply meaningful to me because she got it, that all of our work on environmental issues is connected to everybody’s work on justice,” Dominique says, adding that at the talking circle Gloria “listened very, very closely; it wasn’t about her holding forth, but you could tell she was steering, quietly steering, the conversation into building a sort of sense of communion with everybody.”
Dominique recalls that were no “side conversations” that day. The group sprawled out in chairs, on cushions—Gloria herself in a big, comfy armchair—and they all talked.
Dominique says she had idolized Gloria since the early 1970s, when she was in high school. Her feminist monthly Ms. was the “only and the first magazine” Dominique read. “I just felt connected to a community of women who wanted more and who wanted to do more and be more and believed in that possibility,” says Dominique. These feelings from her youth were with her in Gloria’s apartment in February.
“I was shocked when I saw the news [of her death] because she still seemed vibrant and strong spirited, and she wasn’t somebody who seemed to be fighting her old age. She really embraced who she was, where she was, and where she had come to,” says Dominique.
On that special day in February, after being at Gloria Steinem’s Upper East Side brownstone, Dominique tells People that she made a stop on her way home to pick up a pair of aviator glasses, Gloria’s signature. She tells People, “I’m wearing them right now and they’re all smeared with tears.”
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