Gloria Steinem, the writer, journalist and activist whose work helped transform the conversation around women’s rights, has died aged 92.
“Steinem died peacefully at her home in New York City on September 2, surrounded by people who loved her”, according to her foundation.
For more than half a century, Steinem was one of the most recognisable voices of the feminist movement, but before she ever became an international figure of activism, she was a writer.
Steinem began working as a freelance journalist in New York during the 1960s, at a time when women writers were routinely steered towards fashion, relationships and other supposedly “female” subjects. In 1963, she famously went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to expose the working conditions experienced by women at New York’s Playboy Club.
By the end of the decade, her journalism and activism had begun to converge. In 1972, Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, creating something still remarkably radical for its time: a major magazine owned, edited and written by women, which treated women’s lives, politics and experiences as subjects worthy of serious journalism. It became one of the defining publications of second-wave feminism.
Steinem went on to write extensively about equality, reproductive freedom, politics, violence against women, race and the structures that shape women’s lives. Her books included Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Revolution from Within, Moving Beyond Words and the bestselling memoir My Life on the Road.
Remarkably, she was still writing at 92. Her new memoir, An Unexpected Life, is due to be published this month (pre-order here).
Her activism was equally extensive. Steinem helped found organisations including the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women and the Women’s Media Center, and spent decades travelling, organising, speaking and campaigning for equality. In 2013, Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yet perhaps one of the most important things Steinem did was insist that women’s experiences belonged on the page, in words written by women.
She helped create space for women to write about subjects that had too often been dismissed as private, trivial or inappropriate for public discussion, and helped demonstrate that those experiences were political, cultural and worthy of being recorded.
Gloria Steinem leaves behind decades of journalism, essays and books, but also something much larger: generations of women who understood, partly because writers like her had insisted upon it, that their voices deserved to be heard.
She was 92.
