Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Dies at 92 in New York City

Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who turned magazine journalism into a launching pad for the modern women's movement, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.

The Gloria Steinem Foundation announced her death Thursday in a post on her Instagram account, saying she "passed away peacefully... surrounded by some of the many who loved her." No cause of death was given, and none of the outlets covering her death, including CBS News, NBC News and the New York Post, reported one.

Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, according to ABC News and Fox News. Her early years were unconventional. Her parents, Leo and Ruth Steinem, crisscrossed the country while her father worked as a traveling salesman, and NBC News reported she didn't attend school regularly until age 11. Her mother struggled with mental illness, an experience Steinem later said shaped both her activism and her decision not to have children of her own.

From Playboy Bunny to Ms. Magazine

Steinem graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1956, then spent two years in India on a fellowship, an experience ABC News reported sparked her interest in grassroots organizing. Back in New York, she broke into journalism, and The Guardian reported her first notable assignment came from Esquire editor Clay Felker in 1962, an article on how women were forced to choose between careers and marriage.

Her biggest early splash came in 1963, when she went undercover for 11 days as a Playboy Bunny at Hugh Hefner's New York club to expose how the women working there were treated, according to the New York Post and The Guardian. The Guardian reported she lost 10 pounds during the assignment and that her manager responded by making her costume two inches tighter. Steinem later said the stunt nearly derailed her career, telling an interviewer in 2011 that women journalists who take on sex- or looks-related undercover jobs "may find it hard to shake the very thing you were exposing."

She co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1972, the first major U.S. publication owned and run by women, according to CBS News. Its debut issue, published July 1, 1972, carried a petition of women publicly declaring they'd had abortions, a year before the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

The Guardian reported that before her journalism career took off, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, which she later acknowledged was a CIA front used to recruit American students to counter Soviet influence at international youth festivals. Steinem defended the arrangement, telling interviewers, "If I had a choice I would do it again." That episode did not appear in the BBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News, New York Post, Euronews or Newsweek accounts of her life.

Abortion rights and the fight that defined her

Steinem had an illegal abortion in London at age 22, a fact she spoke about publicly for decades. ABC News reported she dedicated her book "My Life on the Road" to Dr. John Sharpe, the physician who arranged it, quoting his condition that she promise to "do what you want to do with your life."

She celebrated the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and, as Newsweek reported, was still commenting on reproductive rights after the Supreme Court overturned that precedent in 2022. "Either our control over our own bodies is equal, regardless of sex or race, or we're not living in a democracy," she told the Associated Press that year, according to Newsweek.

That framing, treating abortion access as inseparable from constitutional democracy itself, was never universally shared. Critics on the right have long argued Roe was wrongly decided as a matter of constitutional text, that the issue belongs with state legislatures and voters rather than federal courts, and that framing the debate purely as a matter of "control over our own bodies" sidesteps the separate legal and moral status many Americans assign to a fetus. That disagreement remains unresolved in American politics and is precisely why the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling returned the question to the states rather than settling it nationally.

Steinem's activism extended well beyond abortion. The Guardian reported she campaigned against domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and the pornography industry, opposed the Vietnam and Gulf wars, and was arrested in 1984 protesting apartheid outside the South African embassy in Washington. She also backed the Equal Rights Amendment, same-sex marriage, and, later in life, Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement.

Recognition and final years

President Barack Obama awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, crediting her, according to Newsweek, with prompting "lasting political and social change in America and abroad." She also received the National Civil Rights Museum's Freedom Award in 2019.

Her foundation said she spent her recent years "doing the two things she loved most: being in community with others and writing," hosting what it called "Talking Circles" at her Manhattan brownstone. A book, "An Unexpected Life," is forthcoming, according to Euronews and the BBC. Her foundation asked that, in lieu of flowers, admirers donate to Gloria's Foundation.

Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer at 52 in 1986 and later with trigeminal neuralgia, a painful nerve condition, in 1994, according to the New York Post. Neither condition was cited as a cause of death, and as of this writing no cause has been publicly disclosed by her foundation or family.