The pioneering American feminist, writer, organiser and co-founder of Ms. Magazine will be remembered for decades-long advocacy for women’s civil, reproductive and political rights.
Gloria Steinem, the American writer, lecturer, activist and organiser who fought for gender equality and women’s civil and reproductive rights for more than five decades, has died, her foundation said. She was 92.
The co-founder and consulting editor of Ms. Magazine championed the feminist movement from the late 1960s onwards and inspired generations of women.
She died on Wednesday, her foundation said in an Instagram post on Thursday.
“From reluctant spokesperson to a beacon of positive change, hers is a singular journey – an American leader who can speak to us all,” film and theater director Julie Taymor said of Steinem in a 2017 New York Times interview.
Taymor directed the 2020 film The Glorias, depicting Steinem’s life across the years and based on her 2015 bestselling autobiography, My Life on the Road. She was also the subject of a 2018 play, Gloria: A Life, and a 2011 HBO documentary, Gloria: In Her Own Words.
Steinem said she considered herself “an entrepreneur of social change”.
“I want to do justice to the women I meet, to tell their stories,” she told the New Yorker magazine in 2015. “It’s making connections, and using myself to listen, because we can’t empower women without listening to their stories.”
Steinem founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 with former US Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm and writer Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique ushered in the second wave of feminism.
Among other groups, she also created the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Women’s Media Center, Voters for Choice, and the Ms. Foundation for Women.
In 2013 the then president, Barack Obama, awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour.
With her signature long, blonde-streaked, centre-parted hair and aviator glasses, Steinem was the glamorous, hip symbol of the feminist movement, which she emphasised should embrace women of every race.
“If you’ve suffered discrimination, you’re sensitive to it on every level. I learned feminism largely from Black women. Women of colour basically invented feminism,” she told the New Yorker.
Steinem was born on 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, the younger of two daughters. Her father was a travelling antique dealer. Because the family moved frequently she did not attend school regularly until about seventh grade.
Her parents separated when she was 11, following which Steinem lived with and took care of her mother, who had a mental breakdown and suffered from depression.
The experience impacted Steinem’s views on social injustice and marriage, which she believed robbed women of choices and many of their civil rights.
“I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child, my mother. I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else,” she was quoted as saying.
After graduating from Smith College, Steinem began freelancing as a journalist.
In 1963, she worked as a Playboy bunny for 11 days for a story for Show magazine. Her two-part groundbreaking exposé, A Bunny’s Tale, detailed the poor pay and sexist treatment Playboy bunnies – originally waitstaff – endured. The story was made into a 1985 TV movie starring Kirstie Alley.
In 1968, Steinem helped found New York magazine, where her essay titled After Black Power, Women’s Liberation established her as a feminist leader at a time of roiling social change.
But it wasn’t until she attended an abortion speak-out in a New York church the following year that Steinem – who had had a then-illegal abortion in London when she was 22 – said her life as a feminist activist really began.
Ms. Magazine, which she co-founded in 1971, tackled abortion and other issues such as sexism, equal pay and domestic violence – a far cry from the diet of beauty, cookery and supporting-your-husband topics that were the staple of magazines aimed at women.
An early issue included the names of 52 women, including Steinem, who had had abortions, and called for the procedure to be legalised ahead of the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that recognised women’s constitutional right to abortion in the US for nearly half a century.
Steinem was often critical of the limitations of marriage. “Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it,” she said.
She had no children of her own and it was not until she turned 66 that she decided to wed – to South African businessman and environmentalist David Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale.
“I hope this proves what feminists have always said – that feminism is about the ability to choose what’s right at each time of our lives,” she said in a statement about the marriage. David Bale died of brain cancer in 2003.
Steinem continued working into her eighties. She wrote numerous books, including 1986’s Marilyn: Norma Jean about Marilyn Monroe, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem about personal development, and books of essays.
She narrated and conceived the idea for an Emmy Award-winning documentary about child abuse, Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories, for HBO in 1993 and produced the Lifetime film Better Off Dead. She also hosted Woman, a documentary series about violence against women, for the Viceland TV channel.
Author Carolyn Heilbrun – who penned 1995 biography Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem – described her as “the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution”. DM
Reporting by Patricia Reaney, additional reporting by Akanksha Khushi. Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Ros Russell.
Follow the story
