Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became the most recognizable public face of American feminism, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.
Her foundation announced the death on Instagram on Thursday without stating a cause. Steinem's half-century of writing, speaking and organizing reshaped U.S. law and vocabulary around reproductive rights, workplace equality and marriage, and left Ms. magazine — which she co-founded in 1971 — as an institution still in print.
From Toledo to Ms.
Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, and did not attend school full-time until she was 12, in part because she cared for a mother with mental illness. She graduated from Smith College in 1956, spent two years in India on a fellowship organizing non-violent protests with village women, then moved to New York to freelance. Her breakthrough came in 1963, when she went undercover as a cocktail waitress at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club and published "A Bunny's Tale" in Show magazine, an exposé of low pay, tight corsets and swollen feet.
By 1968 she was a founding editor at New York magazine; her 1969 essay "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" made her a national figure. In 1971 she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus and launched Ms. magazine, the first national glossy founded, owned and run by women. The debut issue sold out within a week and drew 26,000 subscribers.
An abortion, then a movement
Steinem traced her turn to organizing to a 1969 speak-out where women shared their abortion stories. She recounted her own, obtained in London at 22 from a doctor who told her to do what she wanted with her life. She coined the phrase "reproductive freedom" and lived to see the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and its reversal. Testifying for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970, she told senators she had been "refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals all for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman." President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Feminism's own quarrels
Criticism came from inside the movement as well as outside. Betty Friedan, whose "The Feminine Mystique" is credited with launching second-wave feminism, accused Steinem of "ripping off the movement for private profit" when Ms. launched, and, the BBC reported, said "no one should mistake her for a leader." A 1977 essay on transgender people drew objections she addressed in 2013, writing that transgender lives "should be celebrated, not questioned." A 1998 New York Times column defending President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair drew fresh criticism in later years; in 2017 she said she "wouldn't write the same thing now."
Steinem married the entrepreneur David Bale, father of the actor Christian Bale, in 2000 at age 66; he died of lymphoma three years later. Asked why she had wed after decades of dismissing marriage, she said: "I didn't change. Marriage changed."
Hillary Clinton told CBS Mornings on Thursday that Steinem was "one of the architects of the entire structure of women's equality." Meghan Markle wrote on Instagram that she still wears "with pride" a bracelet Steinem gave her inscribed "we are linked, not ranked."
Her 13th book, "An Unexpected Life," is scheduled for release later this month, her foundation said.