Gloria Steinem, the journalist, organizer, and feminist icon whose activism helped ignite the modern women's movement, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed Thursday in a statement posted to her official Instagram account and by her foundation, which said she “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her.” A cause of death was not disclosed. Her forthcoming memoir, An Unexpected Life, had been scheduled for release later this month.
Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to Leo and Ruth Steinem. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she spent much of her adolescence caring for her mother before her older sister helped her get to Washington, D.C., to finish high school. She went on to graduate magna cum laude from Smith College in 1956, where she studied government and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, before spending two years in India on a Chester Bowles fellowship, an experience she later credited with shaping her lifelong commitment to grassroots organizing.
Smith President Dr. Sarah Willie-LeBreton said the college joins the world in mourning the loss of a transformative leader and one of the school’s most influential alumnae.
“Gloria was more than an iconic historical figure; she was a steadfast friend, a generous mentor, and an embodiment of Smith's mission: educating women changes the world,” Willie-LeBreton said in a statement, noting that Steinem returned often to campus over the decades to walk its pathways and speak with students. Willie-LeBreton added that Steinem’s belief in the power of a Smith education never wavered, and that her legacy now serves as a bridge between the college's history and the futures its students are building.
Steinem's career as a journalist began in New York in 1960, and she gained national attention in 1963 for an undercover exposé on working conditions at a Playboy Club. By the late 1960s she had turned her writing toward politics and gender, and in 1971 she helped found Ms., the first American magazine to be owned, operated, and written primarily by women—a publication that became a touchstone of what historians now call second-wave feminism. That same year, she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus and the Women's Action Alliance, followed by the Ms. Foundation for Women in 1973.
A movement that took root in the classroom
While Steinem’s public profile was built on magazine pages, picket lines, and political campaigns, higher education leaders and scholars say one of her most lasting legacies is the one built inside lecture halls.
The wave of feminist consciousness that Steinem helped drive through the early 1970s coincided almost exactly with the birth of Women’s Studies as an academic discipline. San Diego State University launched the nation’s first full-fledged Women’s Studies program in 1970, and within a decade several hundred colleges and universities across the country had followed with their own departments, majors, or course offerings examining gender, power, and women's history. Scholars of the movement have long argued that the cultural energy Steinem and her contemporaries generated off campus, created the demand that pushed reluctant university administrations to formalize what students and faculty were already fighting for: a legitimate academic home for the study of women's lives.
That relationship between activism and academia was one Steinem returned to throughout her life. Decades after the first Women’s Studies programs opened their doors, Rutgers University in 2017 established the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies, formally tying her name to the discipline her generation’s activism had helped create. She also remained a fixture on campuses well into her later years, mentoring young organizers and pressing colleges to treat gender equity not as a niche subject but as core to a liberal education.
Higher education leaders were quick to note that legacy Thursday.
Jamila K. Taylor, president and CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, called Steinem “a fierce fighter, a witty writer, and a tireless champion of equity and justice,” adding that she challenged the status quo and will be remembered for the trails she blazed in the name of progress. Taylor noted that Steinem was a steadfast defender of reproductive autonomy who helped women build economic security and political power, and that she believed deeply in women owning and telling their own stories—a principle that animated much of the scholarship the Women’s Studies field would go on to produce.
Taylor pointed to remarks Steinem made in her 2022 commencement address at Wesleyan University, where she described herself as a “hope-a-holic” who believed hope itself was a form of planning.
“That is the essence of what we must all continue to do,” Taylor said, “to ensure that the gender equity Gloria spent her life championing becomes a full and lasting reality.”
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Distinguished Professor of Law holding the Promise Institute Chair on Human Rights at UCLA School of Law, said Steinem's influence on the academy went beyond any single program or endowed chair. She said it reached into the intellectual frameworks, including her own concept of intersectionality, that grew out of the movement Steinem helped build.
Crenshaw, who also directs Columbia’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, said Steinem was “without a doubt, an international icon,” but stressed that she should also be remembered as a three-dimensional person who lived her values every day in ways that went beyond speeches and headlines. Crenshaw said Steinem made allies into friends and changed the course of their lives, adding, “I know this because she changed mine.”
She described Steinem as witty, wry, curious, open, a great listener, a fierce ally, patient, and courageous—someone willing to disagree on principle, which Crenshaw said was never more evident than in the fights others avoided.
“I saw her stand up for Black women and girls even when others stood down,” Crenshaw said. “Her advocacy for us made intersectionality possible.” She said she and the generations of feminists Steinem inspired will continue that work until they achieve the equality and justice Steinem imagined.
Steinem’s death comes at a fraught moment for the academic field her era helped create. In recent years, Women’s and Gender Studies programs at several public universities— including in Florida and Texas—have been scaled back or eliminated amid broader political battles over higher education curricula. For many scholars in the field, Steinem's passing is a reminder of both how far the discipline has come since 1970 and how contested its future remains.
Chera Watson is a freelance journalist and a community college educator.
