Gloria Steinem, one of the most recognisable figures in modern American feminism and a journalist whose work helped reshape public conversations about women’s rights, has died at the age of 92.
Steinem died peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by people close to her, according to a statement announcing her death. The statement said she had continued working for equality until the end and remembered her particularly for her ability to listen and make others feel seen and heard.
Her death closes a public life that stretched from the male-dominated magazine world of the early 1960s to the mass political movements of the 21st century. Along the way, Steinem became a journalist, organiser, author, speaker and one of the most visible faces of second-wave feminism.
She was also a figure who attracted fierce criticism, sometimes from political opponents and sometimes from within the feminist movement itself. Yet few people occupied the intersection of journalism, celebrity and activism for as long, or as visibly, as Steinem did.
A childhood that shaped her view of women’s lives
Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem spent part of her childhood travelling with her family in a caravan. After her father left when she was 10, she helped care for her mother, Ruth, who had long struggled with mental illness. She did not attend school full-time until the age of 12.
Those early years exposed her to some of the pressures faced by women with little economic or social protection.
India later became an important chapter in her development. In the late 1950s, she spent two years in the country, an experience that helped deepen her interest in grassroots political organising. One account notes that she worked with village women involved in non-violent protests against government policies.
The obstacles she encountered when returning to America to make a mark for herself as a freelance writer in New York were far more immediate. The newsrooms were male dominated, and women often found it hard to get assignments serious enough to launch a journalism career.
The Playboy assignment that made Gloria Steinem famous, but came with a cost
Steinem’s breakthrough arrived in 1963 with an assignment that would follow her for decades.
She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny cocktail waitress and wrote A Bunny’s Tale, an investigation into working conditions inside Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club. The reporting exposed the uncomfortable, physically demanding and poorly paid reality behind the carefully marketed glamour of the job.
Another account says she worked undercover for 11 days, wearing the tight costumes and high heels required of the women employed there. Despite the attention the articles received, Steinem later found that the assignment made it harder, rather than easier, for some editors to see her as a serious journalist.
The contradiction would become familiar throughout her career. Visibility gave Steinem influence, but it also meant that her appearance and public image were routinely used to diminish the substance of her work.
By 1968, she was writing for New York magazine, covering progressive politics and women’s rights. Her 1969 article After Black Power, Women’s Liberation helped propel her into national prominence.
The moment that turned journalism into activism
For Steinem, one of the most consequential moments came at an abortion speak-out in 1969.
Women at the gathering were publicly describing their experiences with abortion. Steinem, who had undergone an abortion in London when she was 22, later described the event as a turning point, a moment when she recognised the scale of the need for an organised women’s rights movement.
Her advocacy soon became closely associated with the idea of “reproductive freedom”, a phrase that became part of the wider political language surrounding abortion and women’s autonomy.
The transition did not mean abandoning journalism. Instead, Steinem increasingly used reporting, essays, speeches and political organising as parts of the same project.
She helped establish Ms. magazine with other feminist activists, creating a publication intended to address politics, work, reproductive rights and social inequality rather than the narrow domestic and fashion coverage traditionally associated with many women’s magazines.
The response was immediate. The first issue sold out within a week and generated 26,000 subscribers, despite scepticism about whether a feminist magazine would survive.
Steinem also wrote some of the publication’s most memorable pieces, including the satirical essay If Men Could Menstruate, which inverted traditional gender assumptions to examine how power can determine the meaning society attaches to biology.
A movement leader who was never beyond criticism
Steinem’s growing fame came with a complicated relationship to the movement she represented.
Some feminists objected to the media’s tendency to turn a broad and diverse political movement into a story about one recognisable woman. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, was among those who criticised the attention Steinem received and questioned the way she had become a public face of feminism.
Steinem herself faced repeated attacks focused on her appearance. She later wrote that the suggestion that her achievements were primarily a product of her looks remained a painful accusation even in old age.
Her record was not without controversies of substance either.
She was criticised for a 1998 opinion article defending President Bill Clinton in the context of sexual harassment allegations. Years later, amid a changed public conversation about sexual misconduct, Steinem said she would not write the same piece again.
That willingness to revisit past positions formed part of a career that stretched across enormous political and cultural change.
Activism that continued across generations
Steinem’s causes extended well beyond the early battles most closely associated with second-wave feminism.
She campaigned for reproductive rights, equal pay and equal rights, while also speaking against the death penalty and female genital mutilation.
Her activism included opposition to apartheid. In 1984, she was arrested while protesting outside the South African embassy in Washington. Later in life she remained engaged with movements including Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights and Time’s Up.
In 2017, at 82, she co-chaired and spoke at the Women’s March on Washington held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, describing the surge in activism around her as unlike anything she had previously witnessed.
The continuity was striking. A woman who had entered journalism when editors often confined female writers to subjects such as stockings and hairstyles was still appearing at mass political demonstrations more than half a century later.
A legacy measured in language as much as legislation
Steinem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 from President Barack Obama, who credited her work with helping women gain greater respect and opportunity.
By her 90th birthday in 2024, she was living in New York and could look back on the survival of Ms. magazine, the publication she had helped turn into one of feminism’s enduring institutions. Asked about the legacy she hoped to leave, she spoke less about monuments or political victories than about helping individual people become more fully themselves.
Years earlier, in 2011, Steinem had offered another measure of how she viewed her work. She said she hoped to live to 100 because “there is so much to do.”
She did not reach that age.
But by 92, Steinem had spent more than six decades arguing, reporting, organising and writing about what still needed to be done. Her influence was not confined to a single campaign or political victory. It could be seen in the subjects journalism learned to treat seriously, in the language activists carried into public life and in the generations of women who entered spaces that had once been designed largely without them in mind.
Also Read: Remembering Matt Dee: The Bondi Rescue Lifeguard Behind a $500,000 Suicide Prevention Mission
