Gloria Steinem, the American writer, lecturer, activist and organiser who fought for gender equality and women's civil and reproductive rights for more than five decades, has died, her foundation said. She was 92.
The co-founder and consulting editor of Ms. Magazine championed the feminist movement from the late 1960s onward and inspired generations of women. She died on Wednesday, her foundation said in an Instagram post on Thursday.
Film and theatre director Julie Taymor, who directed the 2020 film "The Glorias" about Steinem's life, described her in a 2017 New York Times interview as "an American leader who can speak to us all." Taymor's film drew on Steinem's 2015 best-selling autobiography, "My Life on the Road." Steinem was also the subject of a 2018 play, "Gloria: A Life," and a 2011 HBO documentary, "Gloria: In Her Own Words."
Steinem described herself as an entrepreneur of social change, telling the New Yorker in 2015 that her work was about making connections and using her own voice to listen, since women could not be empowered without their stories being heard.
Building the movement
Steinem founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971 with former US Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, and writer Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" ushered in the second wave of feminism. She also created the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Women's Media Center, Voters for Choice, and the Ms. Foundation for Women.
In 2013, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour.
With her long, blonde-streaked, centre-parted hair and aviator glasses, Steinem became a defining public image of the feminist movement, one she insisted should embrace women of every race. She said she had learned feminism largely from Black women, telling the New Yorker that women of colour had essentially invented feminism, and that anyone who had suffered discrimination became sensitive to it on every level.
Early life
Steinem was born on 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, the younger of two daughters of a travelling antique dealer. Because the family moved frequently, she did not attend school regularly until around the seventh grade.
Her parents separated when she was 11, after which Steinem lived with and cared for her mother, who suffered a mental breakdown and depression. She later said the experience shaped her views on social injustice and marriage, which she believed stripped women of choices and civil rights, and that having effectively parented her own mother left her unwilling to end up caring for anyone else in the same way.
From Playboy exposé to Ms. Magazine
After graduating from Smith College, Steinem began freelancing as a journalist. In 1963, she worked undercover as a Playboy bunny for 11 days for a story for Show magazine. Her two-part exposé, "A Bunny's Tale," detailed the poor pay and sexist treatment endured by Playboy bunnies, originally hired as waitstaff, and was later adapted into a 1985 television film starring Kirstie Alley.
In 1968, Steinem helped found New York magazine, where her essay "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" established her as a feminist leader amid the era's social upheaval. But she said it was not until she attended an abortion speak-out in a New York church the following year that her life as a feminist activist truly began, drawing on her own experience of a then-illegal abortion in London at the age of 22.
Ms. Magazine, which she co-founded in 1971, tackled abortion, sexism, equal pay and domestic violence, a sharp departure from the beauty, cookery and husband-supporting content typical of women's magazines at the time. An early issue listed the names of 52 women, including Steinem, who had had abortions, calling for the procedure's legalisation ahead of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which recognised a constitutional right to abortion in the US for nearly half a century.
Marriage and later life
Steinem was frequently critical of the limitations of marriage. "Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it," she said.
She had no children of her own, and did not marry until she was 66, wedding South African businessman and environmentalist David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale. In a statement at the time, she said she hoped the marriage proved that feminism was about the ability to choose what felt right at each stage of life. David Bale died of brain cancer in 2003.
Steinem continued working into her 80s, writing numerous books, including 1986's "Marilyn: Norma Jean," about Marilyn Monroe, and "Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem." She narrated and conceived an Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary on child abuse, "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories," in 1993, produced the Lifetime film "Better Off Dead," and hosted "Woman," a documentary series on violence against women, for Viceland.
Author Carolyn Heilbrun, who wrote the 1995 biography "Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem," once described her as the epitome of female beauty and the essence of female revolution.
Source: Reuters
