Gloria Steinem, a trailblazing journalist and activist who devoted her life to fighting for women's rights, died on Wednesday. She was 92.
Her passing was announced in a statement posted on her Instagram. It did not give a cause of death.
"Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her," the post read.
Starting in the 1960s, at a time when women were largely limited to domestic roles, Steinem challenged gender stereotypes and championed feminist ideals like equality, sisterhood and reproductive freedom. In doing so, she inspired generations of women to do the same. Today, she's a household name that is synonymous with the women's rights movement.
"Because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve," then-President Barack Obama said when he awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her commitment to activism in 2013. "She also changed how women thought about themselves."
An early impact
Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. She graduated from Smith College in 1956 with a bachelor's degree in government studies. After Steinem finished school, she spent two years in India on a fellowship, where she traveled with people organizing against caste violence and wrote for Indian publications — an experience that she said shaped her activism in the U.S.
When Steinem returned home, she was briefly involved with a CIA-backed organization that sent American students to Soviet-sponsored youth festivals in order to promote pro-American principles. This would become a point of contention for some feminists later in Steinem's career. She defended her role, asserting that the CIA never attempted to alter the organization's policies.
Steinem then went on to become a freelance journalist in New York during the 1960s — when newsrooms were largely run by men and female reporters were typically restricted in the topics they were allowed to cover.
"I and lots of women could not write about political subjects for the existing magazines," Steinem recalled in an interview with NPR in 2020. "We were thought to be the experts on, you know, food, makeup, babies and celebrities."
Still, she did not allow those limitations to stop her from pursuing hard-hitting investigative stories. And in 1963, Steinem gained national attention for going undercover at one of Hugh Hefner's nightclubs. Her exposé for Show magazine "A Bunny's Tale" revealed the sexism and low wages endured by cocktail waitresses, challenging Hefner's claim that his Playboy empire was a sexual revolution, beneficial for men and women alike.
Steinem went on to serve as a founding editor and writer at New York magazine and a few years later, in 1972, launched her own publication, Ms. magazine, which was named after the honorific title given when a woman's marital status is unknown. It was widely regarded as the first national magazine run by and written for women.
"The women's magazines that are around, most of which all of us who work on Ms. have worked for, are really talking about women in their roles as wives and mothers," she told NPR at the time.
Steinem added that while those magazines served a purpose, she felt they missed the full picture of women's lives.
"I think that all of us, when we read those magazines, get a sense of dishonesty," she said. "It doesn't help you to change your life. And it's not really allowing women to tell the truth about their daily experiences."
The magazine boldly addressed topics that were considered off-limits, such as abortion, lesbianism, domestic abuse and gender roles. Its 1977 cover story about sexual harassment forced the long-silenced issue into the national spotlight and later became the basis of the 1980 hit movie 9 to 5 starring Dolly Parton.
An activist and political organizer
Beyond journalism, Steinem was an activist and political organizer. In 1971, months before she established Ms. magazine, Steinem helped form the National Women's Political Caucus, which focuses on recruiting, training and endorsing more women in politics.
"Women have been running the political campaigns in this country for generations. But by running means that they've been doing all the menial work, you know, addressing envelopes and driving cars and having fundraisings," Steinem told NPR in 1971. "We're not going to do that anymore. Let the male candidates do their own typing."
When the caucus began, there were 15 women elected to Congress, 363 women state legislators, and only seven women city mayors. Today, those numbers have grown to 150, 2,476 and 428 respectively.
Among the legislative issues that mattered most to Steinem was reproductive freedom — driven by her own experience of having had an illegal abortion at age 22. In her 2015 memoir My Life On The Road, she dedicated her book to the English doctor who performed the procedure.
Referring to herself, Steinem wrote: "Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, you must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life… I've done the best I could with my life. This book is for you."
In 2022, a few weeks before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion, Steinem told NPR that even if the decision was reversed, she did not think her and others' work on reproductive justice was in vain.
"It will not change the basic fact that we either have decision-making power over our own bodies — women and men — or there is no democracy," she said.
Steinem added that over the years, she learned that real change is "like a tree."
"Too often we think the tree grows from the top, from Congress. Trees grow from the bottom," she said, adding that what mattered most was the work being done by everyday people and communities.
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