WASHINGTON — Jackie and Gloria came to town this week. Hearts are heavy with remembrance of President Kennedy's assassination 50 years ago, but these two female icons burn brightly as ever — dead or alive.

One came from Camelot with tragic beauty, dressed in a soft pink shade that clashed with the blood and red roses Dallas showered her in that day. The other, a living, breathing barrier-breaker, went to the White House to be honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The First Lady (still known as Mrs. Kennedy here) and Gloria Steinem are disarming and enchanting, each in her own enduring way.

Come to think of it, they look like each other, with voices that could charm birds out of trees. The America girls, born in Southampton, N.Y., and Toledo, Ohio, during the Depression era, are 5 years apart. Later in life, both became editors in New York — by way of the White House and the women's movement.

They are women of the word. Jackie taught her children that words were the most important things in the world.

Gloria's words still pack a punch, as she urged women to make a little more trouble. "Gratitude never radicalized anyone," she said with a smile at a lunch talk at the National Press Club. She noted women don't really claim our own cultural inheritance: "We're walking around on a history we don't know." She lightly dodges the question of passing the torch of leadership — saying that we can light several torches at once. The fact is, the women's movement has lost energy and momentum because there is no clear, charismatic successor to the 79-year-old Steinem.

Serendipity smiled on me. I interviewed Gloria — she insisted I call her that when I said, "Ms. Steinem." Her Press Club talk took place the day before President Obama presented her and 15 other honorees, including President Clinton, with the highest civilian honor. The place had special significance because she was the first woman to ever speak at the Press Club, in 1972. A trailblazing leader in reproductive rights, Steinem became America's most visible, vocal feminist when Ms. magazine was first published — with her name at the top of the masthead.

I remembered the first issue of Ms. magazine, with Wonder Woman on the cover, arriving at our front doorstep. "I've always been a freelancer," Gloria said, making the enterprise sound like a grand experiment. "Wherever there is less money and less authority, that's where women are." As much as the women's movement accomplished in its heyday, she gave a sense that not everything could be charted out in the midst of a revolution. A little daring goes a long way. Yet, as she tells younger women who ask for advice, "Don't take my advice. Listen to yourself." She strikes a warm note in closing: "Let's keep all this going."

I teared up after my talk with Gloria, and sat down to catch my breath. I had just exchanged words with history. This was my mother's movement, languishing, but not over yet. There was still woman's work to be done, not by them, but us.

Jackie's hold over us will always be gratitude and wonder at how she conducted the nation's grief with surpassing grace and dignity at age 34. Her historical sensibility turned back time to Abraham Lincoln's funeral, the other presidential funeral amid black grief. The riderless horse, an ancient symbol, expressed our modern grief at Jack Kennedy's funeral. Everything was, well, nothing but the best.

What a fantastic change she was from simple Mamie Eisenhower, in style, wit and intellect. "I've got one career and his name is Ike," Mamie liked to say. Jackie restored the White House and filled the candlelit rooms with writers, artists, musicians — even an Elizabethan poetry reading.

Once she wrote a poem for her husband. This is how it goes, in the beginning and end:

"Meanwhile in Massachusetts Jack Kennedy dreamed/

Walking the shore by the Cape Cod Sea/

All of the things he was going to be/

All of the things in the wind and the sea."

Amen, sisters, to the glorious lives you've led.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com