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Trailblazing Activist and Feminist Gloria Steinem Dies at 92

The writer and co-founder of ‘Ms.’ magazine was a leader in the women’s movement for rights and equality

Alanna Nash,

AARP

Published September 03, 2026

Gloria Steinem, a pioneering feminist activist and writer, has died. She was 92.

Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The year was 1963, and Gloria Steinem, then a young journalist, was sharing a cab with the novelist Saul Bellow and Gay Talese, a heralded magazine essayist and a pioneer of New Journalism. Talese turned to Bellow and made a snide remark: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

Talese never denied it, but no one could have foreseen that Steinem, who died Wednesday at her home in New York City at the age of 92, would become not just a trailblazing, revolutionary writer but one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

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An activist and organizer for women’s equality, she spearheaded — in the wake of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug — the modern movement of women’s liberation. She advanced civil rights and upended contemporary society by adopting the title Ms. to obscure a woman’s marital status and put her on equal footing with a man. The magazine she cofounded in 1971, also named Ms., would give voice to millions of women seeking gender equality in the workplace and at home, and 300,000 test copies sold out in just over a week.

Though she was richly honored with awards and by seeing her life dramatized on-screen (in three projects in 2020 alone: The Glorias; Mrs. America; and the filmed off-Broadway play Gloria: A Life, featuring actress Christine Lahti in the title role and Steinem joining her onstage), she remained modest and fiercely dedicated to the cause, working and lecturing into her 90s, despite suffering from intense stage fright.

president obama presents steinem the medal of freedon

President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Steinem in 2013.

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When she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in Washington in 2013, she said at a National Press Club luncheon, “I would be crazy if I didn’t understand that this was a medal for the entire women’s movement.”

Born Gloria Marie Steinem on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the second child of Ruth and Leo Steinem, she lived an uncertain, nomadic childhood, never attending school for a full year until seventh grade. Her father, a glorified peddler, liked the itinerant life. The family often lived in a trailer as he traveled around the country to buy or sell antiques. But the Steinems spent summers in Clarklake, Michigan, where Leo built a small resort on farmland and booked bands for the dance pavilion.

“My mother cooked for the bands, which meant that when there was an all-Black band, there were all Black guys sitting around our dining room table,” Steinem told Esquire magazine in 2024. “I was 4 or 5. I remember asking my mother about this color difference. And my mother answered in a wonderful way: ‘People come in different colors, like flowers....’ I just thought, Oh, it’s natural.”

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Her German-Jewish paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a suffragist, the first female elected to the Toledo Board of Education and the president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association. Gloria, a voracious reader who especially loved Louisa May Alcott and the female society of Little Women, might have followed more closely in her footsteps as a child. But she was too busy caring for her mother, a journalist who had suffered a mental breakdown as a young woman and spent almost two years in a sanatorium.

Gloria was 10 when her parents split up, and she lived alone with her mother, by then a delusional invalid addicted to sodium pentothal who would at times disappear into the street in her nightgown. Leo, living out of his car, visited once a year, and Ruth went “from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving” person, as Gloria wrote in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, to “someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book.”

In high school, Gloria found an outlet in dancing and baton twirling, and she dreamed of becoming a Radio City Rockette. “I imagined myself, with some impracticality, as dancing my way out of Toledo,” she told The New Yorker. Instead, she moved to Washington, D.C., for her last year of high school, living with her sister.

“Gloria saw her mother was turned into sort of an invisible crazy person and had no power,” Lahti, the actress and Steinem’s friend, told AARP, “and she herself had no power as a little girl — her needs were not met. She became determined to spend the rest of her life making sure every woman on the planet was visible and valued.”

After graduating from Smith College in the late 1950s, she spent two years in India on a fellowship, then returned to the States, where she worked for the CIA-funded Independent Research Service. From there, she transitioned into reporting at Help! magazine and freelanced for Esquire, writing notably about the new birth control pill. Her 1963 piece as an undercover Playboy bunny, written for Show magazine, established her as a gutsy writer and led to better pay and working conditions for the women who worked at the Playboy nightclubs. In 1968, she joined the nearly all-boys club of writers and editors at the burgeoning New York magazine, where she wrote a political column.

Steinem was always prepared to put her activism before the public, such as this speech she made at a rally outside the United Nations' headquarters in New York in 1978.

Bettye Lane/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images

The following year, Steinem attended a women’s meeting about abortion and, in the spirit of her grandmother, began speaking about feminist causes. Soon after, she testified before the U.S. Senate in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which led to the launch of Ms., the first magazine created and run solely by women, and to the Ms. Foundation in 1973.

Formidable but engaging — she would stop and pose for pictures when strangers approached her in public — Steinem was successful in reaching women in the early days in part because of her relatable looks (she wore miniskirts and her hair long) and calm personality. As Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will, the feminist classic, told The New York Times, “She made a lot of women feel, ‘Oh, that’s what the women’s movement looks like. I can be part of that.’ ”

Though Steinem told Esquire in 2024 that she regretted not having written more (“I was always doing something that took more time than the writing”), she authored 10 books, including the memoir My Life on the Road (2015), The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! (2019) and a new memoir expected out in late September, An Unexpected Life. The activist was also the subject of a 2011 HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words. Her television show, Woman, premiered on Viceland in 2016.

Steinem remained engaged with conversations about current events well into her 90s, frequently hosting "talking circles" in the living room of her Upper East Side apartment. And she even got into podcasting, as AARP noted in 2024.

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