Gloria Steinem dies at 92 in New York. The foundation says she worked until the end

Gloria Steinem died on 2 September at her home in New York City. She was 92. The Gloria Steinem Foundation said she passed away peacefully, surrounded by some of the many who loved her. A cause of death has not been released.

The Associated Press called her the most visible symbol of the American women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and a campaigner who kept that work going for the rest of her life. The trademark was public and consistent: streaked hair parted in the middle, large aviator glasses, a voice that treated abortion, pay and political office as ordinary questions of power rather than private morals.

Steinem was born Gloria Marie Steinem in Toledo, Ohio, on 25 March 1934. Her father sold antiques on the road. Her mother, Ruth, had worked as a journalist before a long illness that left Gloria, as a teenager, as a carer. She later wrote that the years in Toledo taught her what happens when a woman has no independent income and no public language for her own life.

She took a degree from Smith College in 1956, spent two years in India on a fellowship, and watched Gandhian organisers work village by village. That trip stayed in her later books. In New York she freelanced in a market that still sent women to fashion and society pages. In 1963 she took a job as a Playboy Club bunny and published an account of the wages, the costume rules and the way managers treated the women. The piece made her name and also boxed her, for a time, as the undercover girl rather than a political writer.

That changed in the early 1970s. She helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 and, with Dorothy Pitman Hughes and others, launched Ms. magazine in 1972. The first issue sold out. Ms. put the title Ms. itself into circulation as a courtesy that did not advertise marital status. It also printed the names of women who said they had had abortions, at a time when the Supreme Court had not yet decided Roe v. Wade.

On NBC’s Meet the Press in 1972 she put the argument in civic terms: the wish of the average citizen, male and female, is not to have government intervention in that most private area of personal freedom. After the Court overturned Roe in 2022 she told the Associated Press that without the right of women and men to decide about their own bodies there is no democracy.

She wrote Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Revolution from Within, My Life on the Road and, this year, prepared a further memoir, An Unexpected Life, announced with Random House for 22 September. In March she told Vanity Fair she did not want to die mid-sentence. The book will now appear as a posthumous volume.

Honours accumulated late. Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. Spain gave her the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2021. Rutgers created an endowed chair in her name. She kept travelling: campuses, union halls, marches. She married the businessman David Bale in 2000. He died in 2003. They had no children together. She often said the movement itself was the household she chose.

The foundation’s note stressed continuity. Steinem, it said, continued working for equality until the very end. That is the factual claim available today. The legal map she spent fifty years arguing over has shifted several times since Roe, and will shift again. What she left is a public record of how one journalist turned private grievance into organised politics, and then refused to leave the stage once the first statutes were passed.

Funeral arrangements have not been announced. Ms. magazine, the foundation that carries her name, and the archives at Smith will now decide how the papers and the brand are kept. Readers who want the argument rather than the obituary still have the essays. They were written to be used.