Gloria Steinem, a potent voice of US feminism and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, dies at 92

Gloria Steinem, the celebrated author and activist who became one of the most visible symbols and potent voices of the U.S. women’s movement and a fierce advocate for feminist causes for over six decades, has died. She was 92.

With her trademark streaked hair parted down the middle and large aviator glasses, Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. Magazine, was a hugely recognizable presence wherever she went. And she went everywhere: Much of her life as an advocate was spent on the road, speaking at college campuses and community centers, at rallies and marches.

“You can’t do it on the phone or on the web,” she told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview. “You have to be there with all five senses. It should be obvious that people can’t empathize with each other unless we’re in the same room.”

Steinem, who had been in declining health, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to a post on her social media page. She had recently completed a memoir, to be released this fall.

“Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard,” the post said. “Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves.”

Though Steinem had recently become more frail physically, her wit and humor remained totally intact. Her friend and fellow activist, Abigail Disney, said she’d visited Steinem’s Manhattan home a bit over a week ago, as those close to her gathered by her side. “She was just as funny and just as sharp as I have ever known her,” Disney said. And, she said, generous.

“Everything Gloria did was rooted in kindness,” Disney said. “It flowed through her political activism.”

Steinem changed her career path after a start as a journalist

Steinem began her career as a journalist, notably reporting in 1963 on degrading conditions in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire — an undercover assignment she came to later regret. She credits a meeting six years later, where women spoke out in favor of abortion rights, with changing her career path.

“That speak-out was the beginning of activism for me,” Steinem, who had undergone a secret illegal abortion herself at age 22, told the AP in an email in 2022, reflecting on the reversal of Roe v. Wade. “Either our control over our own bodies is equal, regardless of sex or race, or we’re not living in a democracy.”

Those who watched Steinem denounce discrimination for so many years likely never suspected that she’d had to overcome a deep fear of public speaking. She would have simply stuck to writing, she said, if only editors at the time had been willing to let her write about the women’s movement.

But they weren’t interested, she told the AP in 2015. “So I ended up going out and speaking, which was my nightmare,” she said. “I mean, I was terrified. But I’m grateful, even though I still get scared even now.”

Steinem’s visibility endured throughout her life

Time hardly slowed Steinem down; through her 80s, she was traveling the globe and speaking out on issues of importance to her. These included everything from genital mutilation to Korean reconciliation, but it was equality for women that took precedence. “Being a feminist means that you see the world as whole instead of half,” she once said. “It shouldn’t need a name, and one day it won’t.”

As the years went on, Steinem’s visibility endured. A few days after her 85th birthday, she was leading a women’s “talking circle” at an off-Broadway play celebrating her life, where one by one, women in the audience — many fighting tears — rose to thank her and tell their own stories of discrimination. In 2020, her life was the subject of a feature film, “The Glorias, A Life on The Road.”

And at 91, she collaborated on a picture book with Liberian peace activist and Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee aimed at inspiring young people to change the world. “Rise, Girl, Rise: Our Sister-Friend Journey. Together for All” was published in February.

The constant visibility came with a price; even into her older years, Steinem expressed frustration that despite her accomplishments, she was often described as beautiful or glamorous. A 1992 Vanity Fair profile even noted her “spectacular racehorse legs.”

“Nobody ever called me beautiful until I was publicly a feminist, and that was in my mid-30s,” she told AP in a 2011 interview. “It was clear that label was being assigned to me. The most hurtful part is that you work very hard, and people say it’s because of your looks.”

Steinem often responded to hostility with humor

Of course, Steinem also had to deal with hostility — sometimes from surprising places. Appearing on Larry King’s talk show on CNN in 1990, she was visibly stunned when a female caller greeted her cheerfully, then told her to “rot in hell” because she had ruined “the beautiful American family.”

But by then, she noted, at least people were taking feminists seriously. That wasn’t the case in 1972, when she co-founded Ms. Magazine and many commentators — especially male — dismissed it as ridiculous, predicting an early demise.

Among Steinem’s detractors was President Richard Nixon, who was caught on an Oval Office tape ridiculing both her and the “Ms.” title. The ridicule was mutual: In a 1972 National Press Club speech, Steinem called Nixon “the most sexually insecure chief of state since Napoleon.”

It was just one example of Steinem’s trademark wit. Before she married at 66, she often explained her singlehood by saying “I can’t mate in captivity.” Laughter, she wrote, was “the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled.”

Steinem led an unconventional childhood

Gloria Marie Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. Her father was a traveling antique salesperson; she spent her early years on the road with her parents, not attending regular school. “I just read everything I could get my hands on,” she told an audience at Manhattan’s 92NY earlier this year.

In 1944 her parents divorced, and 10-year-old Gloria was left to take care of her mother, a once-promising journalist who struggled to combine her work with running a household and who eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.

As a young girl she excelled at tap dancing — it was even going to be her “ticket out of Toledo,” she said. That particular career did not materialize, though, and she attended Smith College in the 1950s — a time when, she said, women were being educated to be mothers and wives.

But marriage was not on Steinem’s mind. “I was engaged to a very nice man. It wasn’t his fault, but I just didn’t want to get married,” she told her 2026 audience. Instead, she took a modest fellowship to travel to India. After that, Steinem headed to Manhattan, where she couldn’t rent her own apartment because landlords assumed if a single woman “could earn enough, you must be a hooker.”

She wanted to write about politics. But editors gave her assignments on food, fashion, and, in what she jokingly called “the lowpoint of my life,” an article about textured stockings. Even more demoralizing was her experience with an editor who, she said, gave her a choice one day: Spend the afternoon in a hotel with him, or mail his letters on the way out.

She chose to mail the letters. “There was no word for sexual harassment then,” she has said. “It was just life.”

But one assignment in 1963 sounded compelling: posing as a Playboy Bunny for an exposé in the now-defunct Show magazine. Steinem auditioned, assuming she’d be weeded out. But she was given her bunny costume — “so tight, it would give a man a cleavage” — and worked at the job for about a month.

“I could not have made a bigger mistake,” she told the AP in 2011. “It was personally and professionally a disaster. In the short term, it was much harder to get assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.”

Steinem’s writing became more political in her 30s

Steinem was in her 30s when she joined the editorial board of New York magazine, and her writing became more political. In 1969, she went to cover an abortion rights hearing. She had never told anyone about her illegal abortion at 22, in London. That was the moment, she has said, that triggered her career as a women’s rights activist.

Steinem founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 along with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug.

Unlike her friend Abzug, however, Steinem was not comfortable in front of a crowd. Gradually, with her early speaking partner Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black feminist and child welfare advocate, she found her footing. The two formed a powerful partnership at a time when feminism was viewed as largely a white, middle-class movement. In an iconic photo, the two raise their right arms together in the Black Power salute.

As she grew more famous, Steinem drew attention not just for her work but for a glamorous Manhattan life. Asked once about her streaked hair and aviator glasses, she explained that the hair was inspired by Holly Golightly, the free-spirited character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

The glasses? They were “more about hiding,” she said.

When reaction was hostile, Steinem would try to reason that it was a step above ridicule. But sometimes it stung, like a snarky Esquire profile in the early ’70s, so hurtful that she cried, and colleagues called a news conference to defend her.

Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine and stayed with it as an adviser
Then came Ms. Magazine in 1972. “I was so obsessed with the fear that it would fail and be a disgrace to the movement,” Steinem said later. And opponents hoped that would happen. TV newsman Harry Reasoner, an especially tart critic, later apologized on air. Steinem continued with Ms. until it was bought in 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation, and remained an adviser.

Steinem never had children, and said she never regretted it. “No, not for a millisecond,” she told the AP. “It’s important that some of us not have children, to show that we have a choice.”

In 2000, Steinem made a choice she’d never planned to: She got married, at 66, to British activist and businessman David Bale, whom she met at a fundraiser. Bale was the father of actor Christian Bale.

“I thought, ‘I haven’t changed, marriage had changed,’” Steinem said. “David and I wanted to be together, we loved each other. He needed a green card.” They married at a Cherokee ceremony in Oklahoma. Several years later, he became ill with brain lymphoma, and Steinem cared for him until his death in 2003.

Steinem said she had few regrets in life, but did miss being present when her father died. She received word that he’d been in a serious car accident, but did not respond in time, and he died alone. “I had taken care of my mom as a child, and I feared I’d never come back,” she explained. She was also sorry that she didn’t become closer to her mother. “I was so fearful of becoming her,” she said in an HBO documentary, “Gloria: In Her Own Words.”

Steinem’s many books included ‘A Life on the Road’ — though she never learned to drive
Steinem’s books included the 2015 road memoir “A Life on the Road” — but she wryly noted at the time that she’d never learned to drive. It would have taken away, she said, from her ability to converse with hosts who picked her up from airports or train stations. And, she noted, she always loved to chat with taxi drivers.

On Jan. 21, 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington in their pink “pussy hats” for the historic Women’s March, it surprised nobody that the keynote speaker, and the most rousing, was Steinem.

“We are linked,” she told the crowd. “And this is a day that will change us forever because we are together.”

For many women, Steinem was the galvanizing voice that day. She would go on to advocate fiercely. But, though many saw her as a singular figure in history, she often liked to say that if she hadn’t come along, someone else would have accomplished the same things.

By the same token, she said, it was less important that younger people listen to her, and more important that they listen to themselves.

“The primary thing is not that they know who I am,” she said, “but that they know who THEY are.”