Gloria Steinem, feminist leader and journalist, dies at 92

Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist who helped define the modern women’s liberation movement and brought issues such as abortion rights, domestic violence and workplace inequality into the national debate, has died. She was 92.

The Gloria Steinem Foundation said Thursday in a social media post that Steinem “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her.” NBC News reported that the post said she died Wednesday. No cause of death was given.

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the statement said. It said she “lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” and described her New York home as a gathering place for “Talking Circles” and a “center for social justice movements.” Her representatives asked admirers to light a candle in her honor and donate to Gloria’s Foundation.

Steinem was one of the most recognizable figures of second-wave feminism, a movement that reshaped women’s personal, political and professional lives in the United States. Her advocacy touched reproductive freedom, economic equality, domestic violence prevention, voting rights, media representation and the election of women to public office.

She was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. As a child, she traveled frequently with her parents, Ruth and Leo Steinem, and her older sister, Susanne, because her father worked as a traveling antiques salesman. She did not attend school regularly until she was 11, after her parents divorced and she moved back to Ohio with her mother.

Steinem later said her mother’s mental health struggles and doctors’ dismissive treatment of her influenced her views about women’s power and autonomy. “I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child — my mother,” she told People magazine in 1992. “I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else.”

After graduating from Smith College in 1956 with a degree in government, Steinem spent two years in India on a fellowship before moving to New York to pursue journalism. She struggled to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field, but gained national attention in 1963 with a two-part Show magazine exposé on working conditions inside Playboy clubs. For the story, she went undercover as a Playboy bunny and wrote about skimpy uniforms, high heels that made her feet swell, cheerful behavior demanded by management and large portions of tips taken by the clubs.

In 1968, Steinem became a founding editor and political columnist for New York magazine. Her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” helped cement her status as a feminist leader. In 1971, she co-founded Ms. magazine, which began as an insert in New York magazine and became a standalone publication the next year. CBS News described Ms. as the first major publication to be owned, run and written by women. In 1976, it became the first national publication to feature domestic violence on its cover, according to NBC News.

Steinem also co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 to increase the number of women in elected office, and the BBC reported that she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, a group dedicated to fighting sexism, more than 50 years ago. CBS News reported that the Ms. Foundation for Women’s Take Our Daughters to Work Day grew into a global effort involving millions of children.

Her commitment to reproductive rights was shaped by her own experience. At 22, while in London after college, she discovered she had an unwanted pregnancy. “I had all the usual fantasies — maybe if I go horseback riding, maybe if I throw myself down the stairs,” she told NPR in 2021. Abortions were illegal, but she said she found help by “sheer luck.” She publicly disclosed the abortion in 1969 and later dedicated her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to the doctor who referred her for the procedure.

Steinem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama at age 79 and earned journalism honors including the Society of Professional Journalists’ Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award. Her life was portrayed on screen in projects including “Mrs. America.”

She married lawyer and entrepreneur David Bale in 2000, when she was 66. Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale, died of lymphoma three years later. Asked why she married after long criticizing the institution, Steinem said, “I didn’t change. Marriage changed.”