Gloria Steinem

Gloria Marie Steinem was born on 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, the second daughter of Leo Steinem and Ruth Nuneviller Steinem. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg in Germany and Radziejów in Poland; her mother was Presbyterian and mostly of German, including Prussian, and partly Scottish descent. Steinem grew up conscious of both inheritances and belonged wholly to neither faith.

There was a suffragist in the family. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, chaired the education committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was a delegate to the International Council of Women in 1908, and became the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education. She also campaigned for vocational education and, decades later, helped rescue relatives from the Holocaust. Steinem did not meet her as an adult activist, but she knew the story.

Her own childhood was unsettled in ways she wrote about for the rest of her life. Leo Steinem worked as a roaming antiques dealer, and for long stretches the family lived and travelled in a trailer, moving with the buying season. Money never accumulated. Before Gloria was born, her mother - then in her mid-thirties - had what the family called a nervous breakdown. Ruth had been energetic and a great reader; afterwards, by her daughter's account, she was frightened of being alone, could not keep a job, and often could not concentrate long enough to finish a book. She spent long periods in sanatoriums.

Steinem's parents separated in 1944, when she was ten. Her father went to California looking for work; she and her mother stayed in Toledo, in a house that was cold and in poor repair, and the daughter did much of the caring. She was firm, later, that she did not blame her father and did not read the marriage's collapse as simple male selfishness. What she did come to believe was that her mother's illness had been treated carelessly because she was a woman whose ambitions nobody had taken seriously, and that a society which offered a talented woman no way to use herself had helped make her ill.

That conclusion - arrived at slowly, over years - became the foundation of her politics. She described her mother's life as the first injustice she understood from the inside, and it gave her work a particular tone: she rarely wrote about women's inequality as an abstraction, and almost always as something that happened in kitchens, hospitals and rented rooms.

Her older sister, Susanne Steinem Patch, was eight years her senior and became, in effect, her route out. When Steinem was seventeen, Susanne and other relatives arranged for their mother's care so that Gloria could finish school in Washington, D.C., and go to college.

Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo before moving to Washington, D.C., to live with her sister, and graduated from Western High School there in 1952. The move meant a different kind of schooling and, for the first time, a household that ran predictably.

She went on to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, one of the Seven Sisters women's colleges, and graduated in 1956 with an A.B. magna cum laude, elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Smith mattered to her afterwards as an institution as well as a memory: her papers, correspondence and manuscripts are held there in the Sophia Smith Collection, catalogued as MS 237, and are among the most consulted archives of the American women's movement.

After graduating she won a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship and spent about two years in India in the late 1950s. She travelled, wrote, and worked with rural activists in the tradition of Gandhi's independence campaigns, and she later said that the organising she saw there - walking, listening, holding meetings in villages rather than issuing statements - shaped her method more than anything she learned in the United States. Her first published book, The Thousand Indias (1957), came out of that period, written for the Indian government's tourism department.

It was on her way to India, in 1957, that she had an abortion in London, at the age of 22, at a time when the procedure was illegal there except to protect the woman's health. The doctor who referred her, John Sharpe, took a professional risk to do so. Nearly sixty years later she dedicated her memoir My Life on the Road to him, recalling that he asked her to promise two things: never to use his name, and to do what she wanted with her life.

Steinem returned to the United States in 1958 and spent the next years piecing together a writing life. From 1958 until 1962 she worked at the Independent Research Service, an organisation that sent non-communist American students to international youth festivals and that was, as she later disclosed, largely financed in secret by the CIA. In 1960 she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of the satirical Help! magazine, work that put her in contact with New York's comic and comedy worlds.

Her first substantial assignment came from Clay Felker, then a features editor at Esquire, who asked her to write about contraception. He rejected her first draft and made her write it again. The resulting 1962 article, about women being forced to choose between marriage and a career, appeared a year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and covered adjacent ground.

In 1963, reporting for Huntington Hartford's Show magazine, Steinem took a job as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club under an assumed name. The resulting piece, "A Bunny's Tale", ran with a photograph of her in the costume and described the reality behind it: the wired, boned outfit that cut into the wearer; the invasive medical examinations then required of employees; the tips, quotas and constant sexual pressure from customers. She always defended the article and said she was proud of it, though the immediate effect on her career was to close doors - editors now saw her as the woman who had worn the ears, whatever her reasons. Hugh Hefner responded by dropping the requirement that Bunnies undergo gynaecological examinations and testing for sexually transmitted infections.

Other assignments followed: an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan in 1964, and in 1965 a stint writing for NBC's satirical revue That Was The Week That Was, where she contributed a recurring segment called "Surrealism in Everyday Life" and shared in an Emmy nomination for the programme's writing. In 1968 Felker launched New York magazine and hired her as a political columnist, giving her a regular platform on campaigns, protest and city politics.

The decisive assignment came in 1969, when she covered a Redstockings abortion speak-out held in a church basement in Greenwich Village. Women stood up one after another and described illegal abortions in plain terms. Steinem, who had told almost no one about her own, described feeling a "big click" - the moment a private fact becomes a political one. She said afterwards that she did not begin her life as an active feminist until that night. Later that year she published "After Black Power, Women's Liberation", which made her a national figure and set the shape of the rest of her career.

She continued to write essays that travelled far beyond their original readerships: "If Men Could Menstruate", a satirical 1978 piece for Cosmopolitan imagining a world in which menstruation is a male achievement to be boasted about rather than a female shame to be hidden; and "The International Crime of Female Genital Mutilation" in the March 1979 issue of Ms., which brought the practice to the attention of a wide American audience and reported an estimated 75 million women then living with its effects.

Ms. began in 1971 as an idea that no established publisher wanted: a national magazine written by and for women that would treat feminism as news rather than as a lifestyle section. Steinem developed it with a group of founding editors including Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Patricia Carbine, Mary Thom, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Mary Peacock. Clay Felker funded the first issue and ran it as an insert in New York magazine at the end of 1971.

The test print run of 300,000 copies sold out nationwide in eight days. Within weeks the magazine had 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 letters from readers - many of them long, personal and unsolicited, and many from women who had never before seen their own lives described in a magazine. Ms. launched as a standalone monthly in July 1972.

The magazine's editorial choices were arguments in themselves. Wonder Woman, whose powers and costume had been stripped away in the comics, appeared on the cover of the first issue alongside an admiring essay; the character's classic powers were restored in 1973. Ms. ran the word "Ms." itself into common English usage, published early reporting on domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography and pay, and printed the names of women who declared they had had abortions.

Running it was difficult in ways that shaped Steinem's later thinking about media. Advertisers wanted the "complementary copy" - recipes, beauty features - that Ms. would not supply, and the magazine's finances were chronically precarious. It was eventually sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001. Steinem remained on the masthead as one of six founding editors and served on the advisory board for the rest of her life.

In 1974 Ms. worked with public television on the series Woman Alive!, and Steinem appeared in the first episode. In 2005 she extended the same argument about who tells the story by co-founding the Women's Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, an organisation set up to make women more visible and more powerful in media. In 2025 the magazine's history was told in the HBO documentary Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print, in which Steinem and several founding editors were interviewed.

Steinem's activism began before her feminism did. In 1968 she signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, pledging to withhold tax payments in opposition to the Vietnam War, and she was an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement.

In 1970 she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in favour of the Equal Rights Amendment, and published "What It Would Be Like If Women Win" in Time - a sketch of a future without enforced gender roles, in which single people would not be pitied, housework would be shared, and same-sex couples would be able to marry with full inheritance and support rights. On 10 July 1971 she was one of more than three hundred women, among them Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Myrlie Evers-Williams, who founded the National Women's Political Caucus to recruit, train and back women running for office. Her "Address to the Women of America" that day contained the line she was quoted on for the next fifty years: that this was no simple reform, but a revolution. The same year she co-founded the Women's Action Alliance, which supported a network of feminist activists and legislative campaigns until 1997.

She organised in less glamorous places too. She spoke to the first national conference of Stewardesses for Women's Rights in 1973 and supported the group until it folded in 1976. She was one of thirteen women at the first women-only Passover seder, held in Esther Broner's New York apartment in 1976. She spoke at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, alongside Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Jordan and Bella Abzug. In 1984 she was arrested for disorderly conduct outside the South African embassy in Washington, protesting against apartheid alongside members of Congress and civil rights leaders.

In 1991 she opposed the Gulf War publicly with Robin Morgan and Kate Millett, and gave vocal support to Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, predicting that Hill would one day sit on the Supreme Court. In 1992 she co-founded Choice USA to support a younger generation of reproductive rights campaigners. In 1993 she co-produced and narrated the Emmy-winning HBO documentary Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories, about the aftermath of child abuse, and co-produced the Lifetime film Better Off Dead. In the 1990s she helped create Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which took a simple idea - let girls see the working world before they are told what parts of it are theirs - into thousands of American workplaces.

Her later work was largely international. She chaired the advisory board of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, the Indian organisation founded by Ruchira Gupta to fight sex trafficking and inter-generational prostitution, and travelled through India with Gupta in 2014 meeting young feminists and writers. From 2011 she was a co-convener of the Frontline Women's Fund, a project of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute alongside Navi Pillay and Jessica Neuwirth, which channels money, political access and media attention to grassroots women's rights activists; by 2025 it supported 28 partner organisations in 13 countries, including a fund named for Steinem to combat sex trafficking.

In May 2015 she joined thirty women, including the Nobel peace laureates Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee, in walking across the Korean Demilitarized Zone from North Korea into South Korea, with thousands of Korean women joining on both sides. The group called for a formal end to the Korean War, the reunion of families divided since 1953, and the inclusion of women in peace negotiations. The crossing drew criticism from those who felt it lent legitimacy to the North Korean government; Steinem's answer was that no physical symbol better expressed the absurdity of dividing human beings.

In January 2017 she was an honorary co-chair of, and speaker at, the Women's March on Washington, held the day after Donald Trump's first inauguration - at 82, addressing what was one of the largest single-day protests in American history.

Steinem's involvement in electoral politics went back to Adlai Stevenson's 1952 campaign, when she was a teenager, and continued for the rest of her life.

In 1968 she was drawn to Eugene McCarthy for his record on civil rights and Vietnam, but found him dry and uninspiring in person and was repelled by the personal attacks he directed at Robert F. Kennedy. She was among those who persuaded George McGovern to enter the race that year and then, by her own account, worked as pamphlet writer, advance "man", fundraiser, delegate lobbyist, errand runner and press secretary. McGovern lost the nomination at the chaotic Chicago convention, and Steinem wrote afterwards of her disbelief that Hubert Humphrey would not even ask Mayor Richard Daley to restrain the police beating demonstrators in the streets.

She rejoined the McGovern campaign reluctantly in 1972, having felt patronised by his staff four years earlier despite bringing in his largest single donor. That April she said publicly that he still did not understand the women's movement. At the Democratic convention the fight over a reproductive rights plank was lost; Steinem's account was that the women delegates fought hard and would have won had McGovern released his delegates to vote freely. Germaine Greer, covering the convention, gave a flatly contradictory account, writing that Steinem and Bella Abzug had stared blankly into the room while a delegate demanded abortion rights from the floor, and asking why they had not pressed the point. Steinem later observed that this convention was the only occasion on which she and Greer ever met.

In the 1972 race she also ran unsuccessfully as a delegate pledged to Shirley Chisholm in New York.

Ahead of the 2004 election she was among the harshest critics of George W. Bush, saying no administration had been more hostile to women's equality and reproductive freedom, and predicting that a second term would bring the criminalisation of abortion. At a Planned Parenthood event in Boston she called him a danger to health and safety, pointing to his record on clean water, sex education and AIDS relief.

In 2008 she praised both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but endorsed Clinton on the grounds of experience, joking that the country was in such poor shape it might need two terms of each. A New York Times op-ed in which she argued that gender, not race, was probably the most restricting force in American life drew heavy criticism, including from feminists who felt it set two histories of exclusion against each other. She drew further criticism for remarks widely read as belittling John McCain's years as a prisoner of war; her broader point, she said, was that American politics and media are too admiring of militarism in every form. After McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, Steinem wrote that Palin was an unqualified woman who opposed most of what women needed, and compared her to Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

In 2016 she endorsed Clinton again, despite serving as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, which backed Bernie Sanders. An off-hand answer to Bill Maher on HBO - suggesting that young women supported Sanders because the boys were with Sanders - caused a serious backlash, and she apologised, saying she had misspoken and been misinterpreted.

Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday 2 September 2026 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death was announced the following morning, 3 September, in a statement posted to her official Instagram account and to the accounts of Gloria's Foundation. It said she had died peacefully at home, surrounded by some of the many people who loved her, and that she had gone on working for equality until the end. The statement described her as having lived true to an independent spirit, with curiosity and a great sense of humour, and said her greatest gift was her ability to listen - to make other people feel seen and heard.

No cause of death was given, and none has been made public since. Steinem was treated for breast cancer in 1986 and lived with trigeminal neuralgia, diagnosed in 1994, but neither has been connected publicly to her death, and it would be wrong to assume any link. She was 92 and had continued writing and receiving visitors at home in her final months.

The announcement asked that anyone wishing to mark her death give to her foundation rather than send flowers, and invited people to light a candle - a reference to her fondness for the old practice of lighting signal fires on hilltops to show the way to the other side of a mountain. It also quoted a line from her forthcoming memoir about having lived more than fifty years in a brownstone whose rooms had held lives before hers and would hold others after she was gone, and repeated an adage she often used: that the flap of a butterfly's wing can change the weather hundreds of miles away.

Tributes were immediate and international. Hillary Clinton said Steinem had pushed open doors not only for herself but for literally millions of women behind her. The former First Lady Jill Biden said she had spent decades making freedom real for generations of women and girls. The New York Times called her the personification of the women's movement; the Wall Street Journal described her as a longtime symbol of it; the BBC identified her as the leader of American women's liberation; CNN called her the face of second-wave feminism; the Associated Press called her one of the movement's most visible symbols and potent voices; NPR said she had devoted her life to fighting for women's rights; The Atlantic wrote that she had fought for her belief that women could change the world together. Entertainment Weekly, noting her long presence in popular culture, called her a pop culture shaper as well as a feminist icon.

She died three weeks before the publication of her final book. An Unexpected Life: A Memoir, announced by Random House on her 92nd birthday in March 2026, is due to be published on 22 September 2026. Reporting on the book after her death noted that she had given no sign in it that it would be her last, that she wrote of being both older than she had ever imagined becoming and happier than she had imagined she could be, and that she had hoped to live to 100.

As of this page's publication, no details of a funeral, memorial service or resting place had been announced publicly.

For most of her adult life Steinem was cited as proof that a woman could decline marriage entirely, and she was unsentimental about why. She had watched a marriage strain and break under illness and poverty, and she argued for decades that marriage as it was legally constructed asked women to surrender their names, their credit, their work and often their bodies.

She had long relationships all the same. In the mid-1970s she began a relationship of about nine years with Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer she met when he asked her to advise the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department on discrimination. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she had a four-year relationship with the publisher Mortimer Zuckerman. She spoke about these partnerships when asked but never made them a subject of her writing.

On 3 September 2000, at the age of 66, she married David Bale - a South African-born entrepreneur, pilot and animal-rights and political activist, and the father of the actor Christian Bale. The ceremony took place at the Oklahoma home of her friend Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, and followed a Cherokee tradition. Steinem's explanation for marrying after a lifetime of not marrying was characteristically practical: the law had changed enough by 2000 that a wife was no longer required to give up her legal identity, so marriage had become a choice rather than a condition. She also noted, as she often did, that she and Bale were both people who wanted to be together and that at their age nobody could accuse them of doing it because they were supposed to.

The marriage lasted three years. David Bale was diagnosed with brain lymphoma and died on 30 December 2003, at 62. Steinem became stepmother to his four adult children; she had no biological children and said repeatedly that she had never wanted them and had never felt the lack, adding that she had chosen instead to be, in effect, everybody's aunt. She and Christian Bale spoke warmly of each other in public, though she avoided discussing his career.

Her health was rarely a public matter, but she did not hide it. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986 and treated successfully. In 1994 she was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, a condition causing severe facial nerve pain.

Home was a brownstone on New York's Upper East Side, where she lived from 1966 until her death and where she eventually owned the lower three floors. It was famously not a showpiece: it was full of textiles from India, papers, photographs and shelves of books. On her 87th birthday in 2021, Google Arts & Culture published a virtual tour of it. In her later years she used it as a meeting place, hosting hundreds of guests for the "talking circles" she believed were the oldest and most effective form of organising - everyone in a circle, everyone speaking in turn. Her family said after her death that she had committed the house to becoming a centre for social justice movements.

On ageing she was unusually cheerful. She said that as she neared 60 she felt she had entered a phase of life free of the demands of gender that had governed her since adolescence, and she published essays under the title Doing Sixty & Seventy. Interviewed by The New York Times in 2026 for a piece on turning 80, timed to Donald Trump's 80th birthday, she said the worst part of reaching that age was losing people you love. Asked whether she had any advice for the president, she answered with one word: "Resign."

Steinem defined feminism broadly and refused to police the label. A feminist, in her formulation, was simply anyone who believed in the full social, economic and political equality of women and men, and she disliked the argument about whether she was a liberal or a radical feminist. She had been placed in every category, she said, which made it hard for her to take the categories very seriously - though when pressed she usually described herself as a radical feminist, because she believed sexism was a root system rather than a set of separate abuses.

On reproductive rights she was unambiguous, and she believed the framing mattered as much as the argument. She said that if she were remembered for anything it might be for popularising the phrase "reproductive freedom", precisely because it included the freedom to have children as well as the freedom not to - a formulation broad enough to build a coalition around. She spoke publicly about her own abortion from 1969 onwards, and always described it as the first time she had taken charge of her own life.

She was consistently hostile to pornography, which she distinguished sharply from erotica. Erotica, she wrote, differs from pornography as love differs from rape and as partnership differs from slavery; pornography's charge, in her reading, came from the visible fact of one person dominating another. She applied the same argument to same-sex pornography, saying it imitated a conqueror-and-victim template regardless of the participants' gender - a position many gay and lesbian writers rejected - and she regarded so-called snuff films as a direct threat to women's lives.

On same-sex marriage she was, in print, early. Her 1970 Time essay imagined a future in which lesbian and gay couples could marry with full support and inheritance rights, though she did not return to the subject in published work for more than thirty years. She spoke in support again in the early 2000s, arguing that the idea that sex is only legitimate when it leads to reproduction damages women as well as gay men and lesbians, and in 2008 she signed the manifesto "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage", which called for legal recognition of a wider range of households and relationships than marriage alone.

Her position on transgender people changed publicly and she said so. In a 1977 essay prompted by coverage of the tennis player Renée Richards, she wrote that some transsexual people were surgically altering their bodies to fit a gender role defined by body parts, and that feminists were right to feel uneasy about how transsexuality was being used in public argument. In an October 2013 op-ed for The Advocate she wrote that critics had missed the context - the essay had been written amid global protest against forced genital cutting - and stated plainly that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living real and authentic lives that should be celebrated rather than questioned. She apologised for the pain her earlier words had caused. In June 2020 she co-signed a letter to The New York Times with Mona Sinha opposing the Trump administration's removal of civil rights protections in transgender healthcare, arguing that excluding trans people from care endangers everyone.

She was impatient with academic feminism, which she thought had made itself useless by making itself unreadable. Knowledge that cannot be understood, she said, does not help anyone; she joked about wanting to post a warning sign on the road to Yale about deconstruction ahead, and singled out theorists including Judith Butler. Academics, in her view, were trapped by a tenure system that rewarded obscurity, when what was needed was for women's experience to be given a narrative.

On religion she was formed by a Jewish father and a Presbyterian mother and belonged to no congregation. She was drawn instead to Gandhian practice, to Native American traditions of governance and consensus - an interest deepened by her friendship with Wilma Mankiller - and to ritual she could make herself, such as the first women-only Passover seder in 1976 and the talking circles of her later years.

On the Middle East she took a narrow and specific public position. In December 2023 she was among the signatories, with the Ms. co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mariska Hargitay, Ashley Judd, Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, of a letter urging the UN Secretary-General to investigate the sexual violence committed during the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. The signed statement was explicit that condemning rape as a weapon of war implied neither alignment with the Israeli government nor support for the bombing of Gaza. She did not, so far as reputable published sources record, become a prominent public voice on the wider Gaza war.

Steinem was criticised throughout her career from opposite directions, and she was rarely evasive about it.

The most persistent line of attack concerned the CIA. From 1958 to 1962 she directed the Independent Research Service, which recruited non-communist American students to attend the Soviet-sponsored World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki and which was substantially funded, in secret, by the Central Intelligence Agency. Steinem herself disclosed the funding in a 1967 interview with The New York Times, before the story could be used against her. In May 1975 the radical feminist group Redstockings published a report she had helped prepare for the Service on the Vienna festival and raised the question of whether she retained ties to the agency - an accusation she denied then and afterwards. She never apologised for the association. In her experience, she said, the agency of that era was unlike its image: liberal, non-violent and honourable, and an ally in opposing Soviet influence during the early Cold War. Critics argued that a movement leader who had taken covert government money could not credibly claim independence; her defenders pointed out that she had volunteered the information herself, that the funding was routed through foundations that deceived many recipients, and that her work involved sending students to a youth festival rather than intelligence gathering. Readers can weigh those facts; both are true.

Within the movement, she was accused of being a media creation. Some feminists questioned whether a photogenic magazine writer with access to editors and donors could represent a mass movement, and whether her prominence crowded out women who had done the earlier, harder organising. Steinem's own answer was oddly modest: she said that a congresswoman gets identified by her office, while she had no equivalent office and no male counterpart, so the press had nothing to label her but the movement itself.

Her 1972 handling of the abortion plank at the Democratic convention was disputed at the time by Germaine Greer, whose published account contradicted Steinem's - an unresolved disagreement between two participants, recorded here because both versions are on the record.

In 1973 her campaign to restore Wonder Woman's powers and costume had a casualty she did not anticipate. The writer Samuel R. Delany, who had taken over the comic, was removed, and a planned six-issue arc culminating in Wonder Woman defending an abortion clinic was scrapped. Steinem was not aware of the consequences at the time and made no attempt afterwards to put it right, which Delany and others held against her.

On 22 March 1998 she published an op-ed in The New York Times, "Feminists and the Clinton Question", arguing that Bill Clinton's alleged conduct did not amount to sexual harassment, while not disputing his accusers' accounts. It was widely attacked at the time and again during the #MeToo period as a piece of partisan special pleading that cost the movement credibility. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian she stood by the piece's reasoning but conceded that she would not write the same thing now.

Her 1977 remarks on transsexuality were quoted against her for decades, sometimes by trans-exclusionary campaigners claiming her as an ally; she repudiated that use of her words in 2013 and 2020 in unambiguous terms.

In 2016 her remark to Bill Maher that young women backed Bernie Sanders because that was where the boys were caused a rapid and broad backlash, including from young feminists who felt she had reduced them to a dating pool. She apologised and said her comment had been misinterpreted, though the episode was frequently cited afterwards as an example of a generational gap she had not fully bridged.

Smaller controversies followed her into old age. In 2016 the retailer Lands' End featured her in its catalogue, removed her after complaints from anti-abortion customers, and was then criticised again by customers angry that she had been removed. And in a much-replayed appearance on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live she told Andy Cohen exactly what she thought of the Real Housewives franchise; Cohen has recalled that she described it as a minstrel show for women, a judgement he has continued to dispute in public.

The clearest measure of Steinem's legacy is how ordinary the arguments she made now sound. When she began writing, American women could be refused credit in their own names, dismissed for pregnancy, barred from many universities, and prosecuted, with their doctors, for ending a pregnancy. She did not achieve those changes alone or first - she was consistently careful to name the organisers, lawyers and Black feminists who had been at it longer - but she was the person who explained the changes to the general public, in language a reader with no politics could follow.

Her particular contribution was translation. She could take a theoretical claim and turn it into a sentence people repeated: reproductive freedom instead of abortion rights; a satirical essay about menstruating men that made a point about power more efficiently than an argument could. She was a formidable public speaker who often shared platforms with a co-speaker - most famously the childcare activist and organiser Dorothy Pitman Hughes, with whom she toured the country in the early 1970s and with whom she was photographed, fists raised, in one of the movement's most reproduced images.

The institutional legacy is substantial: Ms. magazine, still publishing; the National Women's Political Caucus, which trained a generation of women candidates; the Women's Media Center; Take Our Daughters to Work Day; Choice USA; the Gloria Awards given by the Ms. Foundation for Women since 1988; the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University, created in 2014 to fund teaching and research on equal representation in media; and the Gloria Steinem Equality Fund to End Sex Trafficking within the Frontline Women's Fund. Her papers at Smith College remain a primary source for historians of the period.

She was not a universally beloved figure, and she would not have wanted the memorial version. Conservative opponents, above all Phyllis Schlafly, mobilised effectively against the Equal Rights Amendment and beat it; the amendment Steinem testified for in 1970 has still not been added to the Constitution. The federal right to abortion she spent fifty years defending was overturned in 2022. She lived to see much of the ground she had won contested again, and her response was to keep going and to insist that movements are measured in generations, not election cycles.

Asked what she wanted her legacy to be, she gave an answer that had nothing to do with institutions: she hoped her work might help individual people become more of the unique, valuable, loved and lovable person they wanted to be.

Steinem was a public figure long enough to be portrayed by four generations of actors and to appear, as herself, in comedies and dramas she found funny.

Portrayals: - A Bunny's Tale (1985), a television film adapted from her Show magazine exposé, with Kirstie Alley as Steinem. - Gloria: A Life, a play about her life directed by Diane Paulus, which opened at the Daryl Roth Theatre in New York in October 2018 and ended each performance with a talking circle in place of a curtain call. - The Glorias (2020), a biographical film based on My Life on the Road, in which she is played at different ages by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Lulu Wilson, Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore. - Mrs. America (2020), the FX miniseries about the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, with Rose Byrne as Steinem opposite Cate Blanchett's Phyllis Schlafly.

Documentaries and series: - Gloria: In Her Own Words (2011), an HBO documentary built from archive footage and her own narration. - MAKERS: Women Who Make America (2013), in which she is a central interviewee. - The Sixties (2014), the CNN series, in the episodes 1968 and The Times They Are a-Changin'. - Woman (2016), a documentary series on Viceland about violence against women worldwide, which she produced and hosted; it was nominated for an Emmy. - Dear (2020), the Apple TV+ documentary series. - Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print (2025), an HBO documentary directed by Salima Koroma, Alice Gu and Cecilia Aldarondo about the history of Ms. magazine, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival on 10 June 2025 and was released on 2 July 2025. Steinem was interviewed alongside Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Lindsy Van Gelder and Suzanne Braun Levine.

Appearances as herself: - The L Word (2005), season two, episode 13. - The Good Wife (2014), season six, episode three. - And Just Like That... (2023), in the season two episode "Alive!".

Mentions and cameos in other people's work include the musical Legally Blonde (2007), in which Elle Woods, caught wearing a bunny costume, claims to be dressed as Gloria Steinem researching a feminist manifesto; Jennifer Lopez's 2016 video for "Ain't Your Mama", which samples her 1971 line that this is no simple reform but a revolution; and her 2016 appearance in a Lands' End catalogue, which the retailer withdrew after complaints.

Biographies written about her include Carolyn G. Heilbrun's The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995), Sydney Ladensohn Stern's Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (1997), the graphic biography Female Force: Gloria Steinem (2013), and Sarah Fabiny's children's book Who Is Gloria Steinem? (2014), which is the volume most often bought for young readers.

• The Thousand Indias (1957) - her first book, a guide written during her fellowship years in India.
• The Beach Book (1963) - an early, playful anthology of things to read and do at the beach, with an introduction by John Kenneth Galbraith.
• Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) - the essay collection that gathers "A Bunny's Tale", "If Men Could Menstruate" and her essay on Marilyn Monroe; for many readers it is the place to start.
• Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986) - a reconsideration of Marilyn Monroe as a woman rather than a symbol, with photographs by George Barris.
• Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) - her biggest commercial success and her most argued-over book, linking political powerlessness to internalised self-doubt.
• Moving Beyond Words (1993) - essays on money, bodies, ageing and language.
• Doing Sixty & Seventy (2006) - two long essays on ageing.
• As if Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader (2014) - a selection edited with Ruchira Gupta and published in India.
• My Life on the Road (2015) - her memoir of a lifetime of travelling and organising, dedicated to the doctor who referred her for an abortion in 1957; the basis for the film The Glorias.
• The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! (an illustrated collection of her sayings, with drawings by Samantha Dion Baker; sources date it variously to 2015 and 2019).
• An Unexpected Life: A Memoir (2026) - announced by Random House on her 92nd birthday, 25 March 2026, and due for publication on 22 September 2026, three weeks after her death.

For readers asking about order: the essay collections stand alone and can be read in any sequence, but the autobiographical thread runs Outrageous Acts (1983) to Revolution from Within (1992) to My Life on the Road (2015) to An Unexpected Life (2026).

• Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism
• Emmy nomination (1965) for writing on That Was The Week That Was; later an Emmy citation for excellence in television writing
• Front Page Award; Clarion Award; National Magazine Awards; Women's Sports Journalism Award
• Society of Professional Journalists Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award
• American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California Bill of Rights Award
• Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Liberty Award; National Gay Rights Advocates Award
• Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame (1993)
• Parenting magazine Lifetime Achievement Award (1995)
• Equality Now international human rights award, shared with Efua Dorkenoo (2000)
• United Nations Ceres Medal (also awarded by the FAO) and the UN Society of Writers Award
• Sara Curry Humanitarian Award (2007)
• Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association (2012)
• Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013), presented by President Barack Obama for her civil rights work
• DVF Lifetime Leadership Award; New York Women's Foundation Century Award (2014)
• Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair established at Rutgers University (2014)
• Library Lion award, New York Public Library (2015)
• Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize (2015)
• Ban Ki-moon Award for Women's Empowerment (2017)
• Honorary degree, Yale University (20 May 2019)
• Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities (19 May 2021)
• BBC 100 Women list (2023)
• Named in Esquire's 75 greatest women of all time (2010) and Glamour's 75 most important women of the past 75 years (2014)
• The Ms. Foundation for Women's Gloria Awards, given annually since 1988, are named for her

Steinem was aware, and slightly weary, of the fact that her appearance did political work whether she liked it or not. She was told for years that she did not look like a feminist, which she took as evidence of how thoroughly the word had been caricatured.

The signature elements are easily listed: the long, centre-parted hair with lighter streaks framing the face; the aviator-style glasses, often tinted, and often pushed up onto the top of her head so that they sat above her hairline in photographs; turtlenecks, jeans, wide belts and boots in the 1970s, and a fondness for a good coat. She favoured practical clothes because she was almost permanently on an aeroplane, and she wore the same things for decades.

One exchange did more than any outfit to fix her reputation for composure. Told by a reporter around her 40th birthday that she did not look 40, she replied that this is what 40 looks like - adding that women had been lying about their ages for so long that nobody actually knew. She repeated the line at 50, 60 and 70, and it became a standard rebuttal to the idea that ageing is a female failure.

At some point in her later years, pieces from her wardrobe - coats, belts and jewellery worn at moments of her working life - were sold in a live eBay auction staged by the vintage dealer What Goes Around Comes Around, with the proceeds going to her foundation.

Her home was as recognisable as her glasses. She bought into a brownstone on the Upper East Side in 1966 and never moved, eventually owning the lower three floors. It was decorated with Indian textiles, hung with photographs, and stacked with books and papers rather than styled; the Google Arts & Culture virtual tour published on her 87th birthday in 2021 showed a working apartment rather than a showroom. In her last years it functioned as a meeting hall, with hundreds of visitors seated in circles in her living room, and she left the intention that it should continue as a centre for social justice movements after her.

Several of the lines most often printed under Steinem's name were not hers, and she spent years saying so.

"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" was coined by the Australian writer and politician Irina Dunn. Steinem helped make it famous and was frequently credited with it; when Time attributed it to her, she wrote to the magazine to correct the record and name Dunn.

"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament" is also regularly attributed to her. Steinem quoted it often but always credited it to an older Irish woman driving a taxi in Boston, whom she and the lawyer Florynce Kennedy had met.

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off" became the title of one of her books and is now attached to her name almost universally; the phrase circulated in movement circles before that, and its original author is not settled.

Other recurring confusions worth clearing up: the actor Christian Bale was Steinem's stepson, through her marriage to his father David Bale from 2000 until David's death in 2003 - she was not related to him by blood and had no involvement in films such as American Psycho. Her 1963 Playboy Club exposé is called "A Bunny's Tale", not "I Was a Playboy Bunny", which is the joke version invented for the musical Legally Blonde. Steinem's own 1985 portrayal on screen was by Kirstie Alley; Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander and Rose Byrne played her decades later. And People Forever found no reputable reporting connecting Steinem to Jeffrey Epstein; searches pairing the two names appear to arise from unrelated news items running alongside coverage of her death.