Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist who became one of the most recognisable faces of the American feminist movement and spent more than half a century campaigning for women's equality, has died at the age of 92.
Steinem died peacefully at her home in New York City on September 2, surrounded by people close to her, according to a statement from Gloria's Foundation. No cause of death was announced. Her death closes a remarkable life that took her from an unconventional childhood in Ohio to journalism, political activism and eventually the front lines of one of the most consequential social movements of the 20th century.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, Steinem graduated from Smith College before travelling to India, an experience that would profoundly influence the course of her life.
In 1957, aged 22, she travelled to India on a Chester Bowles fellowship and spent nearly two years in the country. She lived at Miranda House in Delhi, travelled by train across India and encountered politicians, students, activists and ordinary women whose lives were dramatically different from her own. She met Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Indira Gandhi and spent time with followers of Vinoba Bhave, the Gandhian social reformer who was leading the Bhoodan movement.
After caste violence erupted in southern India, Steinem travelled with Bhave's followers through affected villages, where activists brought communities together and encouraged people to speak about what had happened. She later said the experience taught her one of the principles that would define her own activism: listen to people before telling them what they need. The conversations she witnessed among Indian women also influenced the consciousness-raising circles that would later become an important organising method within American feminism. She eventually described her time in India as a pivotal experience that “made me who I am”.
When Steinem returned to the United States, she entered a journalism industry still overwhelmingly controlled by men. Women were frequently pushed towards fashion and lifestyle assignments while political reporting remained largely male territory.
Her breakthrough came in 1963 when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny at New York's Playboy Club. Her resulting investigation exposed the low pay, sexual demands and working conditions behind the glamorous image marketed to the public. The story made her famous, although Steinem later said it initially made it harder for her to be taken seriously as a political journalist.
By the end of the 1960s, she had moved decisively into politics and women's rights. In 1969, she attended an abortion speak-out in New York and publicly discussed her own abortion, which she had obtained in London at 22 when the procedure was illegal in much of the United States. Reproductive freedom would remain one of the central causes of her life.
Then came Ms.
Steinem helped establish Ms. magazine in 1971 alongside other feminist journalists. Its preview edition appeared in New York magazine before becoming an independent publication in 1972. The response was enormous: its initial 300,000 test copies sold out within eight days. Ms. gave national space to subjects that mainstream publications often ignored, from abortion and domestic violence to workplace discrimination, childcare and women's political representation.
But Steinem's influence stretched far beyond journalism. She helped found the National Women's Political Caucus, Women's Action Alliance and later the Women's Media Center, while campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment and greater political representation for women. She worked alongside figures including Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Fannie Lou Hamer, repeatedly resisting attempts to portray herself as the sole leader of a movement built by thousands of women.
President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She continued writing, travelling and campaigning well into old age, remaining particularly vocal on abortion rights after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Her politics inevitably attracted fierce opposition, and generations of feminists did not always agree with her positions or with the movement she helped shape. But few could dispute her influence. Steinem helped take conversations once considered private abortion, sexual harassment, unequal pay, domestic labour and women's political power and force them into American public life.
Nearly seven decades later, her impact remained at the centre of how America understood change.
