In February, after spending a few hours at Gloria Steinem’s Upper East Side brownstone, Dominique Browning made a stop on her way home — to pick up a pair of aviator glasses, Steinem’s signature.

“I’m wearing them right now and they’re all smeared with tears,” Browning tells PEOPLE in an interview just hours after the news that Steinem, a transformational figure in the American women’s rights movement, had died at 92.

“To be in her presence, and she was already frail, but [she] commanded the center of the room,” remembers Browning, 70, a former magazine editor and now the director and co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force.

Browning had joined Steinem and about 15 other women, including ABC News meteorologist Ginger Zee, in February for what they called their first “climate talking circle.” The intimate gathering — a salon of sorts — harkened back to 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,” Browning says.

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Gloria Steinem (center) at a February climate talk at her home in New York City with Dominique Browning (behind, in flowered sweater) and others.Moms Clean Air Force
Steinem, she says, “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.”

“She had the power of her life and her experience and her wisdom, but also she still had huge curiosity,” Browning says.

There were no “side conversations” that day at Steinem’s home, Browning says. Rather, the group sprawled out in chairs, on cushions — Steinem had a big, comfy armchair — as they talked.

All around them in Steinem’s “magical house” in New York City were reminders of her long career, her accomplishments and her colorful life. Literally, says Browning: “You walked in and she had created an entire world of her … history, every table was covered with mementos and souvenirs and pieces of art.”

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“She was very imaginative. She had brought in an old porch from a falling-down house down South and turned that into a little alcove bed, tucked into the side of the living room,” Browning says.

Entering the home, which Steinem had bought up over time, starting with a one-bedroom apartment unit on the second floor, was like entering “another world,” Browning says.

“Even the bathroom was covered, the counters were covered, with mementos, little souvenirs from travel. She’d been all over the world,” Browning says.

Gloria Steinem in 1977.Janet Fries/Getty
In high school in the early 1970s, Browning idolized Steinem, whose feminist monthly Ms. was the “only and the first magazine” she 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 Browning, who even interviewed at the periodical and later went on to a long career in publishing herself, at Newsweek, House & Garden and elsewhere.

These days some of the signal accomplishments of second-wave feminism, which Steinem helped lead, can feel invisible, Browning notes. But they were seismic, helping push forward the social and political liberation of women who, until the ‘70s, needed a man’s permission to obtain credit, for example; and who could be legally raped by their husbands.

“Part of me is super happy that people, women, can take for granted those things … that sexism is not acceptable and you can be whatever you want to be. But at the same time, it can be tragic in the sense that those gains are still young and fragile, and we still need to fight for them,” Browning says.

That was Steinem’s project until even the very end of her life. After many decades of organizing, speaking, writing, agitating — and weathering the constant controversy that courted — Steinem kept going.

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“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,” Browning says. “She really embraced who she was, where she was and where she had come to.”

“She told stories, she reminisced about the various people staying in her apartment, she was funny and she was sharp,” Browning recalls of their February gathering.

“She doesn’t suffer — she never did — suffer fools, right? I don’t think she ever gave that up. But [she was] not unkind at all. … She just seemed to really appreciate the love that was pouring into that room from all of us and sending it back,” Browning says.

As for what motivated her? That was no real secret, Browning says.

“It’s staying engaged, it’s listening and watching and doing everything you can do to make things better — however you’re doing it.”