Gloria Steinem, who helped lead the modern women's movement, dies at 92

Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organiser who became the best-known face of American second-wave feminism, died at her home in New York City on 2 September 2026 at the age of 92. Her death was announced the next day on her Instagram account, which said she had kept working for equality until the very end. No cause was given.

Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934 to a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. She began as a magazine writer, famously going undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 to expose working conditions, and turned to activism in 1969 after reporting on women who had endured illegal abortions. That year her New York magazine essay "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" made her a national figure. In 1971 she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus, which trained women to run for office, and in 1972 she co-founded Ms., the first national magazine run by and for feminists. She later helped create Take Our Daughters to Work Day and, in 2005, the Women's Media Center.

As JTA recalled, Steinem's Jewish background shaped her view that oppression is structural and interconnected. Her friend and Ms. co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin recorded her saying that although she had never identified as a Christian, wherever there was antisemitism she identified as a Jew. In a 1981 lecture at Cornell she argued that the hierarchies of sex, race and class reinforce one another and can only be fought together, an idea that anticipated what is now called intersectionality. In 1975 she signed a letter condemning the United Nations resolution that equated Zionism with racism.

Steinem spent much of her life on the road as a speaker and organiser, in the United States and abroad, and wrote best-selling books including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions and the memoir My Life on the Road. In 2013 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that because of her work more women were afforded the respect and opportunities they deserved, and that she had also changed how women thought about themselves.