Gloria Steinem, the American journalist, author and activist who became one of the most recognisable faces of the feminist movement, has died at 92, her foundation announced on Thursday.
“Yesterday, Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” Gloria’s Foundation said. It did not give a cause of death. Tributes followed from Hillary Clinton, who said Steinem pushed open doors for millions of women; from Nancy Pelosi, who called her a trailblazer for equality; and from Billie Jean King, who said the torch Steinem lit must be carried forward.
Steinem began as a journalist in the 1960s, writing about inequalities at a time when many American women needed a husband’s approval to open a bank account. She came to notice in 1963 with an exposé on sexism faced by cocktail waitresses at New York’s Playboy Club.
She later said her turn to activism came at a 1969 meeting where women described abortions; she had had one in London in 1957, when it was still illegal, and had told almost no one. In the 1970s she founded Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus and helped organise the first National Women’s Conference in Houston.
She kept campaigning into old age. After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, she said banning abortions does not end the need for them, only their safety, and repeated her line: “Don’t agonize. Organize.”
Born in Ohio on 25 March 1934, she had a nomadic childhood, cared for her mother after her parents divorced, and faced scrutiny over her looks, her years as a Playboy Bunny and her long single life. She married David Bale at 66; he died three years later. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013.
Some younger activists found her feminism dated. She was criticised for defending Bill Clinton in a 1989 harassment case and later apologised for suggesting young women backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 because “the boys” were with him.
Those disputes sit beside a career that made women’s political power a public subject rather than a private complaint. The work she named—organising, not only mourning—now passes to the people who stood outside her Manhattan apartment to say a light had gone out.
