Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who co-founded Ms. magazine and became the most recognized face of the modern feminist movement, has died at 92 at her New York City home.
Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who became the most recognizable face of the modern feminist movement and a co-founder of Ms. magazine, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92. Her foundation said she passed away peacefully, surrounded by many who loved her, with the news announced on her official Instagram account. Steinem spent more than six decades pushing women into politics, newsrooms, and the center of American public life, and her death closes a chapter that began long before most of her admirers were born.
Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, into a family with deep reformist bloodlines. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, served as a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and became the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education. Her father, Leo, made a roaming living as an antiques dealer, and the family spent stretches living out of a trailer. Her mother, Ruth, struggled with severe mental illness, an experience Steinem later described as the root of her understanding of how society failed women who could not fit its molds.
After her parents separated when she was ten, Steinem graduated from Western High School in Washington, D.C., and then from Smith College, where she earned her bachelor's degree magna cum laude and joined Phi Beta Kappa. A Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship took her to India for two years in the late 1950s, where Gandhi's methods of nonviolent organizing left a lasting imprint on her activism. Back in New York, she built a freelance journalism career, and in 1963 she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show magazine, writing the celebrated expose "A Bunny's Tale" that documented the low wages and degrading conditions the clubs imposed on women. The stunt made her a household curiosity, but it was a 1969 New York magazine article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," that established her as a leader of the emerging women's movement.
In 1971, Steinem helped found the National Women's Political Caucus alongside Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and other prominent figures, and she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. The following year she co-founded Ms. magazine, which began as a special insert in New York magazine and sold out its 300,000 test copies nationwide in eight days. Within weeks the offices had collected 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters, proof that a mass audience of American women had been waiting for a publication that took them seriously as citizens rather than consumers.
Ms. gave Steinem a platform that reached far beyond the coasts, and she used it relentlessly. In 1972 she became the first woman to deliver a formal address at the National Press Club. She campaigned across the country for the Equal Rights Amendment, helped launch the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, and co-founded the Women's Action Alliance and the Ms. Foundation for Women. Her writings, including the essay collections "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," "Revolution from Within," and the 2015 bestseller "My Life on the Road," turned personal experience into political argument. She also helped create Take Our Daughters to Work Day and, in 2005, co-founded the Women's Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan to push for women's representation in journalism and entertainment.
The institutions she built proved as durable as her rhetoric. Ms. magazine, sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001, kept her on its masthead as a founding editor, and the Ms. Foundation's Gloria Awards have honored women's advocacy since 1988. In 1992 she joined lawyers and activists to co-found Equality Now, an international legal-advocacy group that campaigns against human trafficking, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation, work that carried her influence well beyond American borders.
Steinem's public life was never without friction, including on the right, where her abortion-rights advocacy and her criticism of traditional family structures made her a lasting target, and within her own movement, where her celebrity sometimes rankled fellow organizers. In 1998 she wrote a New York Times op-ed defending President Bill Clinton against sexual harassment allegations, a position she later said she would not repeat. Long after second-wave feminism's peak, she remained engaged, marching in the Women's Marches, endorsing Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and traveling internationally as a speaker into her eighties.
Her later years brought unexpected notes of unity. In 2015, she joined two Nobel Peace laureates and other activists on a walk across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, and she had earlier been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her personal life stayed largely private until 2000, when, at 66, she married David Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale. The marriage lasted three years, ending with Bale's death in 2003; she remained close to her stepson and his family.
Reactions to her death spanned the political spectrum. Hillary Clinton remembered her as one of the architects of women's equality in America, and leaders across the women's movement credited her with opening doors that had been locked for generations. Even critics who spent decades fighting her politics acknowledged the scale of what she built: a permanent infrastructure of organizations, publications, and elected women that did not exist when she started.
Steinem often said she hoped to be remembered less as a personality than as part of a movement, and in that she succeeded. The debates she ignited, over equal pay, abortion, sexual harassment, and the role of women in public life, remain the arguments of every election cycle. What changes now is that the voice that shaped so much of that conversation is silent, and the task of carrying her causes forward falls to the generations she spent a lifetime recruiting.
Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who co-founded Ms. magazine and became the most recognized face of the modern feminist movement, has died at 92 at her New York City home.
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