Gloria Steinem, Feminist Pioneer and Ms. Magazine Co-Founder, Dies at 92
Gloria Steinem, the American feminist, journalist, and co-founder of Ms. magazine, died on September 2, 2026, at her home in New York City. She was 92. A statement shared to her Instagram page the following day said she passed away peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, and "continued working for equality until the very end" (The Guardian). The announcement post drew more than 15,000 likes and 751 comments on the platform.
Born in Ohio in 1934, Steinem entered public life through journalism. In 1962, Esquire editor Clay Felker gave her what she later regarded as her first serious assignment: a feature titled "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed," about contraception. The following year she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for 11 days, producing a two-part exposé of how the glamour models were treated at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club. In 1968, Felker hired her at New York magazine, where she coined the term "reproductive freedom" — a phrase that would anchor decades of advocacy.
Steinem's personal experience shaped that advocacy. She had an abortion in London at age 22, a fact she later spoke about publicly, connecting her own history to the broader political fight over women's right to make decisions about their own bodies.
That fight defined much of her public career. During the 1970s, Steinem was one of the main voices campaigning for women's reproductive rights in the United States (BBC News). She celebrated the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which established a constitutional right to abortion — meaning the right was protected at the federal level and could not be easily taken away by individual states. Nearly half a century later, she saw that decision reversed when the Court overturned Roe in 2022, returning the power to regulate abortion to individual states. It was a development she had spent much of her life working to prevent.
Steinem's influence extended well beyond her writing. She co-founded the Women's Action Alliance, an organization dedicated to fighting sexism — discrimination based on gender — more than 50 years ago. She also co-founded Ms. magazine, one of the first publications to focus on women's issues, which became both a platform for feminist journalism and a touchstone for the broader women's movement of the 1970s and beyond.
Her work sat at the intersection of media and activism in a way that few public figures have matched. The Playboy Bunny exposé and the contraception feature for Esquire were not simply reporting assignments; they established a template for feminist investigative journalism that treated women's everyday experiences as serious subject matter. The term "reproductive freedom," coined at New York magazine, gave the movement its vocabulary. Ms. magazine provided that movement with a widely read publication at a moment when mainstream outlets routinely pushed women's issues to the margins.
The broader context here matters. The arc from Roe to its reversal frames the stakes of Steinem's legacy in particularly sharp relief. She lived to see the constitutional protection she championed in 1973 dismantled in 2022, yet the statement marking her death insisted she "continued working for equality until the very end." That insistence on sustained activism, even amid rollback, was consistent with a career that treated gains as provisional rather than permanent.
Steinem's memoir, titled "An Unexpected Life," had its cover unveiled on her 92nd birthday earlier in 2026. The book now stands as a posthumous capstone to a life that spanned the full trajectory of second-wave feminism — the period of feminist activism that began in the 1960s: its emergence, its institutional consolidation in the 1970s, and the long, contested aftermath in which many of the rights it secured have come under renewed pressure.
