Gloria Steinem Dead at 92

Gloria Steinem, feminine icon and journalist, has died. She was 92.

“Yesterday, Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” read a statement on her official Instagram. “Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end.”

A cause of death was not given.

The activist and journalist was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. She studied government at Smith College in Massachusetts, and graduated magna cum laude in 1956. She spent two years studying and researching in India on the Chester Bowles Fellowship, which inspired her grassroots activism later in life.

She went on to become one of the most prominent figures in the modern feminist movement, taking on politics, abortion, marriage and more through her writings and speeches.

In her book My Life on the Road, she wrote, “When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.”

She opened up about getting pregnant when she was 22 and seeking an illegal abortion in 1957. “I just knew that if I went home and married, which I would’ve had to do, it would be to the wrong person; it would be to a life that wasn’t mine, that wasn’t mine at all,” she told NPR in an interview.

She wrote in her book, which she dedicated to the doctor who recommended her for the abortion, that she struggled in the male-dominated journalism industry. “I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like — well — young women,” she wrote. “I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.”

She gained national attention for her 1963 reporting on the working conditions at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club, calling it the “not-so-glamorous, sexist, and underpaid life of the bunny/waitresses.”

She helped found New York Magazine in 1968, where she worked as an editor and political writer. She also helped found the feminist magazine Ms.

Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986, undergoing surgery and radiation treatment before she overcame the disease. Her husband, entrepreneur and animal rights activist David Charles Howard Bale, died in 2003. Steinem, who had famously denounced marriage as an institution, married Bale in 2000 and said her mind was changed because “marriage changed.”

“We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws,” she said, according to The New Yorker. “If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”