Gloria Steinem, a woman who lived for decades as perhaps the preeminent face of the women’s movement, has died. Her death was announced in a social media post shared by her foundation, confirming that Steinem died yesterday at her home in New York City. A cause of death was not shared. “Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” reads the post. She was 92 years old.
Beginning her career as a journalist, Steinem rose to national attention in the 1970s with articles like “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” In 1971, she co-founded Ms. magazine, the first national feminist magazine in the United States. The same year, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Action Alliance. As The New York Times writes, Steinem “personified the women’s movement.”
Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1934, Steinem knew a transient existence as a child, living with a mentally unstable mother after her father divorced the family. Her initial dream as a young child was to be a Rockette. “When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was–and that my real parents were going to come get me,” Steinem recalled in a 2011 Interview magazine feature. “I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.” Her time spent with books paid off well; she eventually graduated magna cum laude from Smith College.
When Steinem was 22, she became pregnant and ultimately decided to pursue a then-illegal abortion. “I just knew that if I went home and married, which I would’ve had to do, it would be to the wrong person; it would be to a life that wasn’t mine, that wasn’t mine at all,” she told NPR in 2015. “There was no women’s movement. It was supposed to be a secret.” It took years before she spoke about her experience, but recalled working for New York magazine in 1969 and covering an abortion rally and realizing just how many women shared a story like her. “[I]t’s the kind of revelation that comes from people just telling the truth and discovering you’re not alone,” she said decades later.
In 1963, when Steinem was a freelance journalist, she wrote “A Bunny’s Tale,” wherein she went undercover to work as a Bunny in New York’s Playboy Club. “At first, it was such a gigantic mistake from a career point of view that I really regretted it,” she said in 2011. “I’d just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money.” However, the article did have tangible, positive effects on the world; after its publication, Hugh Hefner stopped requiring gynecological exams and STD testing for the women working for him. The article was later the basis for a 1985 TV movie starring Kirstie Alley.
Her career rebounded, however, and by the early ’70s she had co-founded Ms. magazine. The magazine was an immediate success, racking up 26,000 subscribers within weeks. The 1970s were a watershed decade for the women’s movement in the United States, and Steinem was present at basically every step of the way, including speaking at the National Women’s Conference of 1977, which focused on the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was eventually achieved but has not been added to the Constitution.
In the following decades, Steinem remained an outspoken activist on a number of causes, including South African apartheid, the Gulf War, and the treatment of Anita Hill, and co-founder Choice USA in 1992, a youth-led reproductive justice movement. Around the same time, Steinem was also an advocate for Take Our Daughters To Work Day (which later became Take Your Child To Work Day), originally established to make women more visible in the workplace. Her work also became more global; for example, in 2015, Steinem marched during the International Women’s Day for Disarmament, linking arms with 10,000 Korean women on both sides of the DMZ to advocate for a formal end to the Korean War.
“It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other’s lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences,” Steinem reflected in 2011. “Revolutions that last don’t happen from the top down. They happen from the bottom up.” In lieu of flowers, Steinem has requested donations made to Gloria’s Foundation.
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