Gloria Steinem, the journalist who became the most recognizable face of second-wave American feminism, has died at 92.
A post on her official Instagram, shared in the language of Gloria’s Foundation, says she died yesterday at her New York City home, “surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” and that she kept working for equality until the end.
Gloria Marie Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo. She spent an unsettled childhood on the road with a salesman father and helped care for a mother who struggled with mental illness. She graduated from Smith College in 1956, lived in India on a fellowship, then made her name in New York magazines. A 1963 undercover story as a Playboy Bunny made her famous. A 1969 essay argued that women’s liberation was the next civil-rights movement.
She helped launch New York magazine, co-founded Ms. in 1972, and helped start the National Women’s Political Caucus. For decades she was the public voice of fights over abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, pay, and the idea that “sexual harassment” and “battered woman” were names for things people used to call ordinary life. Admirers said she made the movement visible. Critics said she was too media-ready, and that the movement she symbolized was too white and middle-class.
She survived breast cancer in 1986. In 2000 she married activist David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale; he died in 2003. President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She kept holding “talking circles” in the Manhattan brownstone she treated as a movement office. A new memoir, An Unexpected Life, had been set for Sept. 22.
The Instagram notice asks that, in lieu of flowers, donations go to Gloria’s Foundation, which was created to keep that house and archive in the service of the work she spent her life doing.
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