Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2015.

When we went to hear Gloria Steinem speak at the Civic Center recently, I half-expected Rowland to turn up his nose. He likes to call members of the women’s movement feminazis. (Thanks, Rush Limbaugh.)

In fact, Rowland found her charming. Instead of trying to hit us over the head with her views, she spoke softly, engagingly.

Rowland said, “It felt as though we were sitting around the kitchen table chatting like friends.”

Now 81, Steinem has been advocating equality for women since she was in her 20s.

At the Civic Center, she mused about how the cultural domination of men has shortchanged not only women, but all of society.

The relegation of women to lower pay and less-respected jobs (like child care) that women traditionally perform have trapped both sexes into stereotypes — with the result that both creativity and the economy have suffered. Think how much fatter the economy would be if women got the same pay as men.

She described earlier societies — “matrolinear,” she called them — where women had the power. She looked forward to a time when neither sex dominates, and the descriptives “she” and “he” will no longer be part of our vocabularies.

Well, that won’t happen soon, but her vision was certainly alluring.

I have always liked Steinem. I remember our first encounter, years ago, when I was interviewing her by phone for an IJ story and had injected the offhand fact that some female friends and I were doing research on supportive group housing.

Hours after we had hung up, she called me back: “I have some ideas you might like to hear about,” she said.

From then on, I considered her a class act. An ally.

I also remember how she first got my attention about the unequal social roles most women play. She described a dinner party she had attended; when dinner was over, the women automatically rose and began carting the dishes to the kitchen — where, presumably, the women washed the dishes, too.

Where, Steinem asked then, was it written that women should assume this servant-type role?

I dunno, but that was certainly how it was in my life. And I never complained about it, either.

It has been remarkable to me, in recent years, to see my sons automatically accept a hefty share of the household jobs — Guy cooks, Gil carpools, all my sons take care of the dishes.

Even my husband, almost 90 years old and part of a much older generation, is training up nicely.

I applaud Steinem’s perceptions and goals, but I have to be honest — I never personally experienced bias.

Maybe the first and last time was when I was a student at Stanford. On the day I announced my plan to major in journalism, the head of the journalism department tried to dissuade me. You will just get a job at a newspaper, he said, taking a job that would otherwise to go a man, then after a while you will quit and get married — so why start at all?

I laughed then, and I laugh now. I worked in journalism until I was 81, and still write for the IJ part time. Quit? Hah!

I got my first newspaper job at 23, and within a year I had been promoted to city editor.

When I was divorced from my first husband, I got a job at the IJ, first as a copy editor and then as news editor. At the time, I was one of two female news editors on daily papers in California.

This is not to boast, but to show that no one ever put me down for being a woman. At one point, every top job on the IJ was held by a woman — from the publisher to the sports editor.

I am aware that some bosses deliberately hold back women in their employ, often just because they can. And yes, men still demand sexual favors from female staffers, although Steinem disputed the idea that women can “sleep their way to the top.” If they could, she says, “There would be a helluva lot more women at the top.”

She also deplored male violence against women, saying more women had been killed by husbands or boyfriends in the same period as those who had died during 9/11 and our subsequent wars.

She delivered her message quietly, doling out statistics that no one in the audience could dispute. She was a small figure, with short hair instead of the tumble of curls that once defined her. It was hard to remember that way back when she had made headlines as a Playboy bunny.

She closed her remarks with a “parable” about the importance of voting — tracing Clarence Thomas’ arrival in Washington as an aide to the narrowly elected Sen. John Danforth of Missouri. And we all know what damage he has done to women since, from the Anita Hill hearings onward.

Nobody in the audience needed to be told all the good and bad of the male-female equation. Areas of real imbalance remain. It’s just nice to have an assessment from someone as level-headed as Steinem.

In the past, she was a tiger, but maybe her quieter approach will win more supporters.

Change must still happen in a sometimes unfair system that continues to affect us all.