Newsman: Gloria Steinem, the indefatigable feminist and journalist whose activism revolutionized the personal and professional lives of women, has died at best of her 92. A pioneering activist and journalist, Steinem was one of the women’s liberation movement’s most outspoken advocates .Steinem earned some of the highest recognitions possible, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor. Steinem dedicated her life to causes ranging from reproductive freedom and domestic violence prevention to fighting workplace gender inequalities.
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,” her official Instagram page said Thursday. It added that she died Wednesday.
“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the post said.
She “lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the statement added. It hailed her ability to welcome hundreds of guests into her living room for “Talking Circles” and was committed to using her home as a “center for social justice movements.”
Her representatives asked her fans to light a candle in her honor and for donations to be made to her.
She was the face of a movement that radically changed rights for women so they could eventually apply for credit cards without a man’s signature, be admitted to Ivy League schools that previously barred them, and legally get an abortion in the United States.
A pioneer of the 1960s era of second-wave feminism, Steinem advocated for social issues, as well as wrote about them. Her first brush with national fame came in 1963, when she went undercover as a Playboy bunny and wrote an exposé about the poor working conditions that the servers in Hugh Hefner’s famed Playboy clubs endured.
But she came from humble beginnings — and had an unusual childhood.
Steinem, born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, and her older sister, Susanne, spent much of their early years crisscrossing the country with their parents, Leo and Ruth Steinem, who brought the family with him for his job as a traveling antiques salesman.
Steinem did not attend school regularly until she was 11, after her parents divorced and she had moved back to Ohio with her mother.
Ruth Steinem had mental health problems, something Steinem has said deeply influenced her. Seeing doctors dismiss her mother’s needs contributed to her desire to get women more of a voice in society. And being forced to care for her mother deterred her from wanting children of her own.
I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child — my mother.
“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.”
In 1956, Steinem graduated from Smith College, the all-women’s liberal arts school in Massachusetts, with a degree in government — an uncommon major for women then. While overseas in London at age 22 after graduation, she discovered she was carrying an unwanted pregnancy.
“I had all the usual fantasies — maybe if I go horseback riding, maybe if I throw myself down the stairs,” she recalled to NPR in 2021.
Abortions were illegal at the time, but by “sheer luck,” she said, she found a physician who directed her to a doctor who was secretly doing abortions. She dedicated her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to the doctor who referred her to the woman who performed her abortion.
Steinem’s abortion spurred her lifelong interest in reproductive rights, but she did not publicly reveal that she had had it until 1969.
In 2019, she told Al Jazeera it bothered her that the debate was framed as “pro-choice” versus “pro-life” and said no one is “pro” abortion.
“Nobody would choose one if they didn’t have to,” she said.
Steinem spent two years in India on a fellowship after she graduated from college and later went to New York to pursue journalism, a field in which she struggled to be taken seriously as a woman.
It wasn’t until her blockbuster piece on Playboy bunnies was published in 1963 in Show magazine that she gained recognition.
For the two-part exposé, written in diary form, Steinem assumed a fake identity and accepted a job for several weeks as a bunny. The women, she wrote, were expected to always “think about something happy” so they could put on a cheerful persona for their male clientele, even as their clubs demanded exorbitant portions of their tips and forced them to dress in skimpy outfits and heels so high, Steinem’s feet became swollen and permanently expanded a half-size.
In the following years, while growing her profile as a feminist activist, she helped launch two key magazines.
In 1968, she became a founding editor and political columnist for New York magazine. Her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” cemented her place as a feminist icon.
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.”
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 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.
Gloria Steinem’s calls to protect bodily autonomy live on as Roe faces reversal,Reproductive rights in America.
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 that doesn’t define a woman by her marital status. 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.
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 were 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.
As Steinem established herself as a leader in the fight for legalizing abortion, for gender equality in the workplace, against child abuse and in other areas, she was not without controversy.
In 1992, she released a book titled “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” that focused on personal development. The idea behind it, she explained, was that to effect change on a societal level, individuals need inner strength. But it was panned by some reviewers as a pivot away from activism instead.
In September 2020, while Donald Trump was president, Steinem spoke about how she handled criticism.
“The most painful criticism or attacks come from people who share your values, not people who don’t share your values,” she told The New York Times. “If Trump spoke well of me, I would shoot myself.”
Steinem cared deeply about politics, co-founding the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 to increase the number of female legislators.
Little slowed her down, including a diagnosis of breast cancer at age 52. She was diagnosed early and able to get it treated. She was 79 when then-President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her life was depicted on screen multiple times, including in “Mrs. America,” an FX miniseries that streamed on Hulu in 2020. She received numerous accolades in journalism, including the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Steinem got married at age 66 to lawyer and entrepreneur David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale, in 2000. Many of her followers were surprised: Steinem had long dismissed marriage as an institution that ruined relationships.
Bale died of lymphoma three years after they wed. When later asked why she changed her mind about marriage, she told a reporter, “I didn’t change. Marriage changed.”
“If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights,” she added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”
She told the Times that Bale helped her learn the importance of living in the moment and accomplishing what you set out to do.
“Even if I live to 100, which I have every intention of doing, it’s not that long left,” she told the paper in 2020. “I just hope that I don’t die saying, ‘But! Wait!’”
