Gloria Steinem, feminist icon and founder of Ms. Magazine, dies at 92

CNN

By Zoe Sottile, Chris Boyette, CNN

(CNN) — Gloria Steinem, the American journalist and political activist who became the face of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has died at age 92, according to her verified Instagram account.

Steinem died Wednesday in New York City, “surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” the statement on social media said.

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the statement read.

Steinem was a feminist icon who spent the better part of a century advocating for women’s rights in the workplace, the right to abortion and sex education. Her name and face became almost synonymous with the fight for women’s rights. She continued to be a vocal proponent of feminism and other liberal causes, like anti-war activism, into her 90s.

She even coined the term “reproductive freedom,” according to an interview published in the 1981 oral biography book, “Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.”

“In later years, if I’m remembered at all it will be for inventing a phrase like ‘reproductive freedom’ … as a phrase it includes the freedom to have children or not to,” she said at the time.

She was honored for her decades-long civil rights work with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, as well as the United Nations’ Society of Writers Award and the National Gay Rights Advocates Award.

“Gloria was at heart an optimist. Her activism was rooted in optimism, and that’s a moral choice. And she made it every day,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS News on Thursday. “She was one of the architects of the entire structure of women’s equality.”

‘A Bunny’s Tale’

Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem inherited an activist tradition. Her grandmother served as chair of the educational committee of the National Women Suffrage Association and also helped rescue members of her family, who were Jewish, from Germany during the mid-1930s.

Steinem graduated from Smith College and moved to New York in 1960, where she was often sexualized and dismissed while searching for reporting jobs in a male-dominated journalism industry. “We need a reporter, not a pretty girl,” she says she was told by an editor at Life. By 1962, one of her first articles was published in Esquire Magazine, an exploration of birth control and shifting sexual beliefs among college students – themes that would continue to appear in her later work.

The next year, the young writer worked undercover as a cocktail waitress at the New York Playboy Club – publishing a scathing expose of the low pay and working conditions for so-called “bunnies” at the club, including pressure to perform sexual favors.

The story, “A Bunny’s Tale,” effectively launched Steinem’s writing career. At the same time, it caused her to miss out on “serious journalistic assignments because I had now become a Bunny – and it didn’t matter why,” she wrote in a postscript to the article.

In 1968, Steinem was offered a job at the newly founded New York Magazine, where she wrote a column about politics, including articles about Shirley Chisholm’s history-making run for president, Nixon’s candidacy and a New York abortion speak-out.

Political ascension

Steinem began parlaying the fame that came from her provocative writing to political organizing.

At a time when the nascent feminist movement was largely associated with White, middle-class women, Steinem made race and social class central to her thought and writing. In an influential 1969 article for New York Magazine, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” she highlighted parallels between the Black Power movement and the feminist movement and urged connections between different organizing groups to form a so-called “revolutionary vanguard.”

In 1970, she testified in front of the Senate in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment – a proposed constitutional amendment first introduced in 1923 that stipulates that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

The next year, Steinem co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus as a result of Congress’ failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. The caucus sought to help get women elected to political office, believing that women legislators would best represent women citizens.

Steinem’s speech at the caucus’ founding event in Washington, DC, helped make her a household name.

“Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends,” she said. “We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen, or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”

In 1972, she partnered with child care advocate Dorothy Pitman Hughes to co-found Ms. Magazine, thought to be the first national American feminist magazine, which is still published today.

She explained why she started the magazine in a 2011 HBO documentary: “I realized as a journalist that there really was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women.”

Contradictions and controversy

Throughout her career, Steinem was an avid supporter of the right to abortion and access to reproductive care, issues she highlighted in Ms. Magazine. She had an abortion when she was 22 in London. The doctor who conducted the illegal procedure asked that she make two promises, according to the New Yorker: “First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.” She kept the procedure a secret for almost 10 years.

Abortion “is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that,” she said in a 2011 interview with the Guardian. “I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right.”

But it wasn’t just her views that sometimes brought her criticism. Steinem’s distinctly stylish look – she was often photographed in mini-skirts and aviator sunglasses with a curtain of long, straight hair – sometimes triggered reductionist analyses.

“There is the notion that an attractive woman, whatever that means in society, a pretty girl can’t be smart,” she told Teen Vogue in 2011. “We are still identified by our looks instead of our hearts or heads.”

Steinem often criticized marriage as a sexist institution and remained unmarried until her 60s, when she married David Bale, an entrepreneur and the father of actor Christian Bale. He died of lymphoma only three years later.

Her beliefs covered a barrage of political causes. She was a staunch anti-war advocate, she defended LGBTQ rights even when they were considered taboo in the feminist movement and she championed the work of women from marginalized communities – like the Indian feminist economist Devaki Jain and the Native American activist Wilma Mankiller.

Steinem was not immune to criticism. She faced accusations of collaborating with the CIA for her participation in youth events sponsored by a CIA-funded organization in the 1950s. A 2016 New York Times profile of her claimed she “started her career as a C.I.A. operative,” which she promptly disputed.

“I was never told what to say or do at two Soviet-led youth festivals more than a half-century ago where American attendance was funded by C.I.A.-backed foundations,” she wrote in response.

She also received blowback from a 1998 op-ed in which she argued that President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky didn’t constitute sexual harassment. Years later, she said she “wouldn’t write the same thing now.”

Tributes – and a pledge to carry her work forward

Steinem “lived a life that really had meaning,” Clinton told “CBS Mornings,” remembering her as a devoted friend, a champion of worthy causes and “our avatar of possibility.”

The icon’s influence spanned generations. After her death, politicians, activists and artists flooded social media with tributes honoring Steinem’s life and legacy.

The tributes reflected on Steinem as a trailblazer who had a unique ability to make others feel seen and heard. The messages shared gratitude for all she accomplished and pledged to continue the work she started.

“For decades, she fought to make that freedom real for generations of women and girls. She spoke up when it was difficult, listened to those whose voices too often went unheard, and never stopped pushing our country forward,” former First Lady Jill Biden and former President Joe Biden said in an Instagram post.

Tennis champion and LGBTQ activist Billie Jean King honored the pioneering advocate, urging future generations to carry on her legacy.

“She devoted her life to the pursuit of equality and political change, working tirelessly for over 70 years to ensure each generation built upon the work of the previous one,” King said. “We are forever grateful for her many accomplishments. She lit a torch many years ago. It is now our responsibility to keep it lifted into the future.”

Legendary singer-songwriter and environmentalist Carole King also pledged future generations will “continue the fight for power, equality, and respect.”

“We hold you in our hearts with love and gratitude,” she wrote in a tribute to Steinem.

“She was fierce and kind and full of grace,” star producer Shonda Rhimes said.

A lifetime of advocacy

Throughout the later decades of her life, she continued traveling the world to advocate for women’s rights and other civil rights issues and writing about politics and society. She served as honorary co-chair and speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, DC, in 2017, following Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president.

“We are united here for bodily integrity,” she said in front of the thousands of demonstrators. “If you cannot control your body from the skin in, you cannot control it from the skin out, you cannot control your lives, our lives. And that means that the right to decide whether and when to give birth without government interference.”

Steinem also stepped into the literary world, publishing several collections of essays and a biography of the actress Marilyn Monroe. She detailed her own experiences in the feminist movement and political organizing in a 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road.”

She was “genuine, generous, curious, thoughtful,” author and cultural critic Roxane Gay remembered Steinem. “She lived a staggering life and her passing is a staggering loss tempered only by the ferocity of her legacy.”

Her career has been dramatized in multiple forms, including the 2018 play “Gloria: A Life,” the 2020 biographic film “The Glorias” and the 2020 miniseries “Mrs. America,” which depicts the fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

In her late 80s, she even made a cameo – as herself – in 2023 in the sequel to the TV series “Sex and the City,” “And Just Like That…”

Even Steinem’s New York home has become something of an archive of the feminist movement. Much of her organizing work, including the first meetings of Ms. Magazine, took place at Steinem’s three-story brownstone on the Upper East Side, where she had lived since the 1960s. Google Arts and Culture and Steinem’s foundation launched a virtual tour of the historic building for her 87th birthday in 2021.

Gloria’s Foundation hopes to preserve the feminist ethos of that building, as well as the activist’s own archives. The nonprofit says its goal is to “ensure that both the space, and the progress fostered in that feminist environment, is preserved, both for historical knowledge and appreciation and to foster future work.”

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who teamed up with Steinem to cold-call voters ahead of the 2020 presidential election, shared personal memories and photos of herself with the icon in a tribute Thursday.

“Publicly, we did interviews together, called young voters to encourage them to have their voices heard, attended award ceremonies, and brainstormed how to help this beautiful yet complicated world to become more equitable,” Meghan wrote in a post shared on Instagram, adding that, in private, Steinem counseled her and spent Thanksgiving with her family.

“But my very favorite story about GLO is when she was out one day in NY, and a woman approached her in absolute awe and said she wanted to introduce her young daughter to her (though she was embarrassed to say the young girl may not know who she was),” the Duchess said. “Gloria replied, ‘It doesn’t matter if she knows who I am. What matters is that she knows who she is.’”

Reflecting on her career in an interview with the New Yorker in 2015, Steinem said, “People are always asking me, ‘Who will you pass the torch to?’”

“The question makes me angry,” she went on. “There is no one torch – there are many torches – and I’m using my torch to light other torches. There shouldn’t have been a ‘first’ Gloria Steinem, and there won’t be a last one.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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