Gloria Steinem Dead At 92

[Apec 370]

Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92

She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who, in galvanizing the modern women’s movement, helped millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday in New York City. She was 92. Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause. It said Ms. Steinem had died peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones.

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette. But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose. Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women’s magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. The first glossy national periodical to be created, owned and run entirely by women, Ms. magazine, founded in 1971, sought to capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.

The magazine served as the movement’s manifesto, an incubator for social transformation and a blueprint for action. As such, it helped embolden women as they fought blatant discrimination and harassment in the workplace and unspoken oppression, and sometimes outright abuse, at home.

“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Ms. Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

Among the messier dramas of the period was one that developed between Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem. The two shared certain goals, including equal pay, more women in public office and legalized abortion. But Ms. Steinem also sought broader cultural and social change that included liberating women from media stereotypes and recalibrating the power dynamic between men and women. Significantly, she also wanted to expand the movement beyond the white, middle-class housewives of its early days — those inspired by “The Feminine Mystique” — to include younger women, working women and women of color, as well as lesbians and other marginalized groups.

Ms. Friedan saw the focus on sexual politics as a distraction and famously warned that including lesbians (the “lavender menace”) threatened the movement’s goal of achieving mainstream acceptance. (She later supported lesbian rights.)

From left, Ms. Steinem in 1971 with Representative Bella Abzug, Democrat of New York; Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York; and Betty Friedan. Together they founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to push for a greater role for women in politics. Credit...Charles Gorry/Associated Press

Decades after the movement dissipated and progressive women faced renewed setbacks, Ms. Steinem continued to push for their rights and equality. Indefatigable, she wrote essays and lectured into her 90s, and the news media never stopped seeking her opinion. She was the author of nearly a dozen major nonfiction books; her latest, “An Unexpected Life,” is scheduled for publication in late September.

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Even as she personified the women’s movement, Ms. Steinem defied the stereotype of “women’s libbers” as sexless, humorless and dateless. She led a glittering social life and enjoyed relationships with many high-voltage men, including Mike Nichols, the director, and Mort Zuckerman, the real estate and publishing mogul. In the 2026 interview, she called Franklin A. Thomas, the pathbreaking president of the Ford Foundation, the love of her life, the man with whom she felt most in sync.

But she spurned marriage (mostly) and remained child free, a choice she said she never regretted.

“Not for a millisecond,” she said at 82. “Not everybody with a womb has to have a child, like not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer. It’s a choice, and it’s a wonderful choice, but if everybody has to do it, it’s no longer a choice.”

Her lifestyle and unapologetic feminist beliefs made her a lightning rod, adored (though not always) by liberals, demonized (always) by conservatives. She and other single women were caricatured as man-hating, bra-burning lesbians intent on upending the social order and destroying the American family. When Ms. Steinem appeared on “Larry King Live” in 1990, a female caller memorably told her to “rot in hell” for what she had wrought.

Much of the hostility toward her was public and overt — especially with the rise of the religious right and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly — but it was also woven into the fabric of her everyday life. While the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the movement’s spokeswoman (to the annoyance of its many other leaders and of the decidedly anti-hierarchical Ms. Steinem herself), it simultaneously patronized and marginalized her as a rebel with a pretty face.

When she was first job-hunting in New York, an editor at Life turned her away. “We need a reporter,” he told her, “not a pretty girl.” An editor at The New York Times Magazine propositioned her, she said. Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine and Ms. Steinem’s mentor, said he gave her an assignment because she had “great legs.”

She broke through with a witty exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” for Show magazine in 1963. Squeezing into a too-small, electric-blue satin corset, with a bow tie at her throat and a pair of satin rabbit ears bobbing on her head, she worked undercover as a cotton-tailed waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article was praised for revealing the degrading work conditions in that male-fantasy cocoon. But she regretted writing it, for a time anyway, because some used it to dismiss her as frivolous.

But it was as a writer — journalist, columnist, essayist, author — that Ms. Steinem made her name. She also had a knack for pointed aphorisms.

“The truth will set you free,” she liked to say, “but first it will piss you off.” (Variations on this theme have existed since the Bible; Ms. Steinem popularized this one and used it as the title of a 2019 collection of essays.

Another: “Self-esteem isn’t everything — it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”

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Some of the achievements of the women’s movement — greater economic independence, more legal rights and protections, inroads into all levels of virtually every profession, more men sharing domestic responsibilities — may be taken for granted today. But they were unimaginable when the movement began.

And for Ms. Steinem and many others, that struggle never ended.

 

Women still earn less than men for the same work (81 cents for every dollar made by a man, according to the 2024 census). The Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination on account of sex, was belatedly ratified but is still not part of the Constitution. The 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, a central goal of the movement, was overturned in 2022; some states went on to reverse or curtail other hard-won reproductive rights. No woman has been elected president. Anti-female bias remains entrenched.

“I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell,” Ms. Steinem told The Times in 2022. “We are still dealing with the same issues.”

Read more at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/us/politics/gloria-steinem-dead.html

Edited 5 hours ago by Apec

[bxr 2,649]

Oh, wow … I remember seeing Gloria at the Ace Hotel Theatre when she released her memoir … she and Melissa McCarthy had a conversation about My Life on the Road … sharp, prescient, unassuming in an astute way, keen sense of humor … a signature presence

[Roughhouse Dandy 13,791]

A long life well lived. 

[Economy 53,026]

Wow thanks for sharing. Its nice to get a mini biopic with the news of ones passing rather so we can reflect a bit on that persons life than just "so and so passed away"