Danielle Robay's 'No Phones Allowed' Talking Circles w/ Gloria Steinem | SPOTIFY EXCLUSIVE

In the 1970s, Gloria Steinem and a group of women began gathering in her Upper East Side brownstone to do something deceptively simple: sit in a circle and tell each other their honest stories. No phones. No agenda beyond the theme of the night. Decades later, Danielle Robay, who served as Steinem’s fellow, now hosts these same “talking circles” herself. She calls them “one of the most feminist things you can do.”

What a Talking Circle Actually Is

A talking circle is a structured but open-ended conversation among women—Robay emphasizes she invites people from “totally different backgrounds, schools of thought, professions”—who gather for roughly two hours around a single topic. Past circles have covered artificial intelligence, women in sports, and masculinity. The ground rule is that phones are banned. The magic, Robay says, is that when people are fully present and not distracted, they start to realize: “Oh, that also happened to me. That happened to me too.” She sees this as the same mechanism that powered the early Me Too movement—women discovering they were not alone in their experiences.