Gloria Steinem dies at 92 in her Manhattan home

Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday, 2 September, at her home in Manhattan. She was 92. The Gloria Steinem Foundation said on Thursday that she passed “peacefully” and “surrounded by many who loved her.” No cause was given.

Steinem called herself an entrepreneur of social change. The phrase fit the work better than any single office. She started as a journalist in New York, wrote for Esquire and New York magazine, and in 1972 helped found Ms., a title that treated work, law, sex and money as subjects rather than as household hints. She helped build the Women’s Action Alliance, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, Voters for Choice, the Women’s Media Center and the Ms. Foundation for Women.

Barack Obama hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom on her in 2013. Julie Taymor filmed her life as The Glorias in 2020, from the 2015 book My Life on the Road. A further book, An Unexpected Life, was described by the foundation as still on the way. In her last years she kept “Talking Circles” in the same apartment. The foundation said those meetings will continue and that she wanted the house to stay a base for organising.

She was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. The public story that stuck was the 1963 assignment that put her undercover as a Playboy bunny, and the later years on the road with speaking partners from Dorothy Pitman Hughes to Flo Kennedy. She campaigned against domestic violence and female genital mutilation, against the pornography trade as she defined it, and against the Vietnam and Gulf wars. She wrote a letter to Justice Harry Blackmun after Roe v. Wade thanking him for saving women’s lives. Women’s Media Center president Julie Burton repeated that line about Steinem herself on Thursday.

The movement she fronted did not move in a straight line. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to meet its deadline. Roe was struck down in 2022. Steinem kept working anyway, which is the part of the record the foundation chose to stress. She listened more than she speechified in rooms that already agreed with her, a habit friends cited as the reason younger organisers still came to the apartment.

She leaves no children. She was married once, late, to David Bale, who died in 2003. The institutional legacy sits in the magazine, the foundations and the legal and workplace changes that outlived any one campaign. The personal legacy, if the talking circles hold, sits in a living room on the Upper East Side that she refused to turn into a museum while she was in it.

Funeral plans were not in the first foundation note. The fact that mattered on Thursday was simpler. The most recognisable American feminist of the late twentieth century died at home, still booking conversations, at 92.