Gloria Steinem, fierce feminist trailblazer, dies at 92
NBC News · LC · trust 49/100
BREAKING NEWS Sep. 3, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC U.S. news U.S. news Gloria Steinem, fierce feminist trailblazer, dies at 92 A pioneering activist and journalist, Steinem was one of the women’s liberation movement’s most outspoken advocates. Gloria Steinem in San Francisco in 1977. Janet Fries / Getty Images file Share Add to Google By Elizabeth Chuck Gloria Steinem, the indefatigable feminist and journalist whose activism revolutionized the personal and professional lives of women, has died. She was 92.
Steinem “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” a post on her official Instagram page said Thursday. It added that she died on Wednesday, although it did not give a cause of death.
“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the post said.
She “lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the statement added. It hailed her ability to welcome hundreds of guests into her living room for so-called “Talking Circles,” and was committed to using her home as a “center for social justice movements.”
Her representatives asked her fans to light a candle in her honor and for donations to be made to her Gloria’s Foundation charity.
Steinem dedicated her life to causes ranging from reproductive freedom and domestic violence prevention to workplace gender inequalities.
She was the face of a movement that radically changed rights for women so they could eventually apply for credit cards without a man’s signature, be admitted to Ivy League schools that previously barred them and legally get an abortion in the United States.
A pioneer of the 1960s’ era of second-wave feminism, Steinem advocated for social issues as well as wrote about them.
Her first brush with national fame came in 1963, when she went undercover as a Playboy bunny and wrote an exposé about the poor working conditions that the servers in Hugh Hefner’s famed Playboy clubs endured.
Steinem earned some of the highest recognitions possible, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the nation’s top civilian honor.
But she came from humble beginnings — and had an unusual childhood.
Gloria Steinem walks a picket line outside the South African Embassy in Washington in 1984. AP file Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem and her older sister, Susanne, spent much of their early years crisscrossing the country with their mother, Ruth, and their father, Leo, who brought the family with him for his job as a traveling antiques salesman.
Steinem did not attend school regularly until she was 11, after her parents divorced and she had moved back to Ohio with her mother.
Ruth Steinem had mental health problems, something Steinem has said deeply influenced her. Seeing doctors dismiss her mother’s needs contributed to her desire to get women more of a voice in society. And being forced to care for her mother deterred her from wanting children of her own.
I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child — my mother.
“I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child — my mother,” she told People magazine in 1992. “I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else.”
In 1956, Steinem graduated from Smith College, the all-women’s liberal arts school in Massachusetts, with a degree in government — an uncommon major for women then. While overseas in London at age 22 after graduation, she discovered she was carrying an unwanted pregnancy.
“I had all the usual fantasies — maybe if I go horseback riding, maybe if I throw myself down the stairs,” she recalled to NPR in 2021.
Abortions were illegal at the time, but by “sheer luck,” she said, she found a physician who directed her to a doctor who was secretly doing abortions. She dedicated her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to the doctor who referred her to the woman who performed her abortion.
Steinem’s abortion spurred her lifelong interest in reproductive rights, but she did not publicly reveal that she had had it until 1969.
Steinem, left, joins former Congresswoman Bella Abzug and actress Mary Tyler Moore, right, during a meeting of women’s rights leaders on Capitol Hill in 1981. John Duricka / AP file In 2019, she told Al Jazeera it bothered her that the debate was framed as “pro-choice” versus “pro-life” and said no one is “pro” abortion.
“Nobody would choose one if they didn’t have to,” she said.
Steinem spent two years in India on a fellowship after she graduated college and later went to New York to pursue journalism, a field in which she struggled to be taken seriously as a woman.
It wasn’t until her blockbuster piece on Playboy bunnies was published in 1963 in Show magazine that she gained recognition.
For the two-part exposé, written in diary form, Steinem assumed a fake identity and accepted a job for several weeks as a bunny. The women, she wrote, were expected to always “think about something happy” so they could put on a cheerful persona for their male clientele, even as their clubs demanded exorbitant portions of their tips and forced them to dress in skimpy outfits and heels so high, Steinem’s feet swelled and permanently expanded a half size.
In the following years, while growing her profile as a feminist activist, she helped launch two key magazines.
In 1968, she became a founding editor and political columnist for New York magazine. Her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” cemented her place as a feminist icon.
In 1971, she co-founded Ms. magazine, which started as an insert in New York magazine before becoming its own standalone magazine the following year. In 1976, it became the first national publication to spotlight domestic violence on its cover .
As Steinem established herself as a leader in the fight for legalizing abortion, for gender equality in the workplace, against child abuse and in other areas, she was not without controversy.
Some,…
Read the original at NBC News →
Open in TruthVane →