Gloria Steinem, Trailblazing Feminist Organizer, Dies At 92

Gloria Steinem, a writer and trailblazing feminist organizer who became the face of the women’s movement, has died. She was 92.

She died on Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to a post on social media, surrounded by loved ones.

A founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, Steinem was a dynamic leader and mentor for scores of activists. For decades, Steinem was an oft-quoted voice for women‘s rights, writing, speaking and eagerly seeking converts to the cause one-on-one. By launching Ms. magazine, she helped to chronicle the movement as it grew — and also made it possible for women to tell their stories.

“Gloria, more than any other individual,“ wrote Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham of Steinem's influence, “changed my mind-set and helped me grasp what the leaders of the movement — and even the extremists — were talking about. I recall her encouraging me to throw off some of the myths associated with my old-style thinking."

Graham added: "Gloria kept telling me that if I came to understand what the women's movement was all about it would make my life much better. In time it inevitably dawned on me, and how right she was!”

The persistent and insistent Steinem was a symbol for those who would extol feminism, as well as a lightning rod for those who disapproved of it. She was fine with that.

“Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers in politics or unconfident reporters who fail to see our own half of the world,” she wrote in her 1983 book, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.”

A tactician who connected dots across social movements, Steinem was an advocate for intersectionality years before activists started using the word, working to bring together the oppressed and neglected.

"Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman," she wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed in 2008. "It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie." That op-ed was typical Steinem, a condemnation of GOP presidential nominee John McCain and "the anti-feminist right wing" for selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate rather than "a woman who knows what a vice president does."

Even as new issues came up and old issues took new forms, activism remained Steinem's calling.

“She beautifully accepts all people wherever they are along their path of learning,” actress-activist Emma Watson wrote of Steinem in a foreword to the 2019 edition of “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.“

“She is completely without ego because she knows she’s serving something bigger than herself. To me, it is almost as if from birth Gloria was calibrated like a compass to true north, and is now patiently (and with good humor) making her way toward that destination.”

President Barack Obama awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

“As a writer, a speaker, an activist,“ Obama said at the time, “she awakened a vast and often skeptical public to problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, unfair hiring practices. And because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve. But she also changed how women thought about themselves.“

Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934. Her mother, Ruth, suffered from mental-health issues. Steinem’s parents split up when she was 10, leaving her largely to care for her mother for the next seven years.

“In many ways, our roles were reversed: I was the mother and she was the child,” Steinem wrote later in her essay “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” which movingly described this difficult situation. Steinem would say her mother’s spirit had been crushed by a world uninterested in her as a unique person.

As she finished up high school, Steinem moved to the Washington area to live with her older sister and then attended Smith College in Massachusetts. After graduation, she became a freelance writer, profiling people from Paul Newman to Pat Nixon.

In 1963, she went undercover in New York’s Playboy Club.

"I was fitted for false eyelashes today" began her subsequent article on that experience. That article, “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” made quite a splash, drawing attention to the indignities of those working as scantily clad hostesses while offering sympathetic portraits of these women.

Nevertheless, Steinem found the opportunities to do serious writing to be limited. “The fallout from the Bunny story lasted decades,” wrote Karen Karbo in 2019. “Whatever it was Gloria aimed to do — investigative journalism, political activism, magazine founding, and editing — she was dismissed for being too attractive.“

She branched out into activism, though she soon discovered that many of her fellow activists on the left were not inclined to treat women as their equals. Steinem was a supporter of the 1968 presidential bid of South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, an early foe of the Vietnam War whom Steinem found to be an “unpretentious, honest man.“

But McGovern later told her she had been blocked from a bigger role in the campaign by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who rejected McGovern’s touting of Steinem by repeatedly insisting: “No broads.”

Steinem‘s 1969 article "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" was a landmark statement for the women’s movement. Appearing in an issue of New York magazine featuring football star Joe Namath surrounded by adoring women on its cover, Steinem’s essay took a stab at answering the question “What do women want?” — and why.

“The idea is, in the long run, women’s liberation will be men’s liberation, too,” she concluded.

Two years later, she was one of the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus. The group brought together a powerhouse collection of leaders including New York Reps. Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, “Feminine Mystique” author Betty Friedan and longtime activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Myrlie Evers, LaDonna Harris and Dorothy Height.

In a New York Times article headlined “Women Organize for Political Power,” Steinem was quoted as saying: “Our aim should be to humanize society by bringing the values of women's culture into it, not simply to put individual women in men's places.“

The group called for “the elimination of sexism, racism, violence and poverty,” as well as an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and passage/ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. An early campaign button read: “Women! Make Policy, Not Coffee.”

She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. Having done some freelance writing for women's magazines like McCall's and the Ladies Home Journal, Steinem had come to realize those were publications that she herself did not want to read.

"It started in desperation, I think," she said of Ms. in 2024.

The founders struggled to get off the ground until New York Magazine's Clay Felker offered to fund a test issue in December 1971. That issue was a success, and regular publication began in July 1972. "It's intended to be a portable friend," Steinem said in a TV interview.

"Women are human beings first, with minor differences that apply largely to the single act of reproduction,” Steinem wrote in her introductory essay. “We share the dreams, capabilities, and weaknesses or all human beings, but our occasional pregnancies and other visible differences have been used — even more pervasively, if less brutally, than racial differences have been used — to mark us for an elaborate division of labor that may once have been practical but has since become cruel and false."

She concluded: “I am continually moved to discover I have sisters. I am beginning, just beginning, to find out who I am.”

ABC news anchor Harry Reasoner mocked the new publication on his newscast: “It’s so clearly just another in the great but irrelevant tradition of American shock magazines." He predicted Ms. would be gone within months.

Instead, Ms. became popular and influential. Reasoner (who later apologized on the air) was hardly the only man surprised by its success. President Richard M. Nixon was overheard telling Henry Kissinger on a 1972 White House audiotape: "For shit’s sake, how many people really have read Gloria Steinem and give one shit about that?"

The magazine made history by publishing a list of 53 prominent women who had undergone abortions, including tennis champion Billie Jean King, writer Susan Sontag, historian Barbara Tuchman, actress Lee Grant, singer Judy Collins and Steinem. “Our purpose is not to alienate or to ask for sympathy, but to repeal archaic and inhumane laws,” the accompanying text stated.

Months later, abortion was legalized nationally in the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. Maintaining and expanding what Steinem called “reproductive freedom” would be a major focus of hers over the next decades.

Steinem also supported adding an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, an effort that fell painfully short.

"I hope this committee will hear the personal, daily injustices suffered by many women–professionals and day laborers, women housebound by welfare as well as suburbia," she testified to the U.S. Senate in May 1970 in favor of the ERA. "We have all been silent for too long."

The Senate sent the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972, but it was never added to the Constitution. Once the battle was joined by Phyllis Schlafly and other foes who argued the amendment would have dire consequences for the American way of life, momentum slowed and the amendment fell three states short of ratification.

Steinem would later lament that she and other activists had initially thought the idea not radical enough and therefore hadn’t pushed as hard as they should in the early stages of the ratification fight.

Schlafly was far from the only conservative leader to assail Steinem. Her angriest foes regarded Steinem as one of the Rush Limbaugh-branded “feminazis” who supposedly hated men, detested the traditional family unit and wouldn’t be happy until every woman had an abortion. She was, as a New York Times book reviewer noted, “attacked for stridency, subversion, perversion.”

But that New York Times book reviewer, Diane Johnson, found her to be nothing like the negative view of her: "Reading Miss Steinem's essays, written over two decades and collected for the first time, one is struck by their intelligence, restraint and common sense, as well as by the energetic and involved life they reflect."

For her part, Steinem took criticism as a sign that she was making an impact. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon," she wrote in 1972.

Major issues continued to come to the fore. Sexual harassment was a fact of life from her young professional days that she fought to eradicate. She campaigned against pornography that victimized women; a 1980 profile of Linda Lovelace captured the ugliness behind the infamous porn hit “Deep Throat.”

Steinem continually worked on economic issues such as unequal pay for women, and sought to bridge racial divides, often speaking on tour with Black activists such as Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Florynce Kennedy. She was also a peace activist.

“As an itinerant organizer, my two own biggest rewards are still a sense of making a difference and the birth of ideas,” Steinem wrote in “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.”

Over the years, Steinem helped found a number of organizations, including the Women’s Action Alliance, Voters for Choice (later the Planned Parenthood Action Fund), the Women’s Media Center and the Ms. Foundation for Women. Through the latter, Steinem played a role in the birth of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which was conceived as a New York City event to increase the self-esteem of girls. When Steinem gave an interview about the event to Parade Magazine, it took off nationally.

Later generations of feminists would sometimes criticize her as not radical enough, particularly given her connections to establishment figures and the fact that in her early professional days she had done some work for a CIA-financed foundation. In 1998, she defended President Bill Clinton in an essay that downplayed accusations of harassment against him.

Steinem would later say she was glad she wrote it, while acknowledging she might not have done so again. “I wouldn’t write the same thing now because there’s probably more known about other women now,” she said in 2017.

And, occasionally, she was thrust into the spotlight unwittingly. In 1986, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She would later say that the diagnosis and battle against cancer gave her a new perspective on something she hadn’t really thought about before —aging, and the challenges it offered. “I've realized that this aging in the last third of life or whatever is a new country,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross.

Regardless, Steinem didn’t lose sight of her goals, nor of the potential for setbacks. “I’m old, but the movement is young,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “Every social justice movement has to last at least 100 years or it doesn’t really get absorbed into society. We’re only 30 or 40 years into this!”

As time passed, her pop culture presence grew.

Kirstie Alley starred as her in 1985 in “A Bunny‘s Tale,” a TV movie based on Steinem's Playboy Club experience. In 2020, there was “The Glorias,” a movie in which she was played by different actresses in different stages of her life, and “Mrs. America,” which dramatized the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. Rose Byrne portrayed her in that production, with Cate Blanchett as Schlafly and Margo Martindale as Abzug.

HBO produced a 2011 documentary about her titled “Gloria: In Her Own Words,” and she was also prominently featured in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print," a 2025 HBO documentary.

Heidi Schreck referenced Steinem's enduring influence in her 2017 play "What the Constitution Means to Me," which combined Schreck's own awakening with a primer on some of the myths of American history. In a conversation on stage about the play, Steinem praised Schreck and said: "There are two things — history and the past — and they are not the same."

Steinem also continued to churn out books, including “Revolution From Within: A Book Of Self-Esteem,” “My Life on the Road“ and “The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!”

In January 2017, Steinem responded to the first inauguration of President Donald Trump with a speech at the Women’s March in Washington.

“We are here and around the world for a deep democracy that says we will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected,” Steinem said. “God may be in the details, but the goddess is in connections. We are at one with each other, we are looking at each other, not up. No more asking daddy.“

She added: “This is a day that will change us forever because we are together. Each of us individually and collectively will never be the same again. When we elect a possible president, we too often go home. We've elected an impossible president; we're never going home.“

In 2019, in the updated edition of “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,“ Steinem noted how much work still needed to be done.

“Clearly,“ she wrote, “we have not yet escaped hierarchies based on gender and race, caste and class, but movements against them are now imagining a freedom that lies beyond them.”

Her 90th birthday in March 2024 was marked with tributes and public celebrations. Steinem told an interviewer from Vogue that she remained hopeful despite devastating recent setbacks in the Supreme Court for women's reproductive rights.

"Hope is a form of planning," Steinem said to Stephanie Sporn. "If you don’t imagine what could be, you’re already defeated. We need companions in hope because we are social animals. But hope is practical and necessary."