For decades, Gloria Steinem invited women into her Upper East Side apartment, a cozy space packed with mementos from her life as a crusading feminist. The women participated in her famous “talking circles,” shared stories and talked political strategy. And in recent years, after the fall of Roe v.

Wade and the election of Donald Trump, some of the attendees arrived with the expectation that their host would feel as despairing as they did."People would walk in and say, ‘God, she’s going to be so depressed,’" said Cindi Leive, an executive producer of “Dear Ms.,” a documentary series on the magazine Ms. Steinem co-founded. "This woman is seeing everything she’s worked for crumble all around her." But people who were close to Ms. Steinem, who died on Wednesday at 92, said that she was more focused on counting victories than defeats, even in her later years when feminism was dealt a series of bruising setbacks. As reality shows and social media influencers glorifying traditional gender roles help shape popular culture, and access to contraceptives and abortion was abruptly curtailed in many states, Ms. Steinem held a longer view, her friends said. After she made speeches at college campuses and conferences, she would come back home with stories of the progress that she was seeing around the country, a continuation of the transformations that she helped usher in beginning in the 1970s."She felt that battles were unfinished," said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who with Ms. Steinem and other women founded Ms. magazine. "But she focused me and everybody else on the future.

She really didn’t want to give the tradwives and the manosphere the credit for being long-lasting." The morning after Ms. Steinem’s death, tributes from admirers poured in from around the world. Many people credited Ms. Steinem’s activism for creating opportunity, for making it possible for women to choose whatever they wanted with their lives. Her work challenged a status quo that left women vulnerable to domestic violence, with far fewer legal rights than men and scant opportunities in the work force. "Over the decades, she became one of the architects of the entire structure of women’s equality," Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, wrote on social media.

But amid the praise, there were also questions: Was the work she led being slowly undone in recent years? Was Ms. Steinem right to remain stubbornly positive about the future of women’s rights, even as antipathy toward women seems to keep flaring hotter? And maybe most urgently, during this unsteady moment in feminism, should there be someone who can pick up her mantle and lead with authority?"It’s hard to think that there’s a single person or a single organization" leading the charge, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, who credited her with broadening the women’s movement across class and race. "There are so many folks writing and thinking about these issues that it’s hard to have any one entity hold up that mantle. Our world is more diffuse." Some of feminism’s gains are well established, she said, pointing out that women are running corporations and outnumbering men in law schools. "We’re not talking gender balance, but certainly very different from where it was in the early ’70s," she said. "Progress has been slow and painful." That progress led to successive waves of backlash, from Phyllis Schlafly’s winning campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment to the current manosphere, where there is even debate over whether to remove women’s right to vote. Still, many younger people have a hard time imagining the sweeping economic, political and social changes could ever be rolled back, said Marcia Ann Gillespie, a former editor of Essence and a longtime editor at Ms magazine.

And in the 2016 campaign, when Mr. Trump promised to appoint judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade, there was not enough urgency among women to address the threat to abortion rights.