Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist who became one of the most influential figures in the American feminist movement and helped push abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment and gender politics into the center of the nation’s political debate, has died at 92.
Steinem died at her New York City home, according to an announcement from her foundation Thursday. Her death was also confirmed by the Associated Press and Reuters.
For more than half a century, Steinem occupied a unique position at the intersection of journalism, activism and Democratic politics.
To her supporters, she was a pioneering advocate who fought against barriers facing women in employment, politics and American society.
To conservatives, Steinem increasingly represented something larger: the transformation of feminism from a movement centered on legal equality into a powerful progressive political force closely tied to abortion rights and the Democratic Party.
Whichever view one takes, Steinem’s influence on American politics is difficult to overstate.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, Steinem initially made her name as a journalist.
One of her best-known early assignments came in 1963, when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to report on working conditions inside New York’s Playboy Club.
But it was the emerging women’s movement of the late 1960s that transformed Steinem from a journalist covering political and cultural change into one of the people driving it.
Steinem later identified a 1969 meeting concerning abortion rights as a turning point in her activism. The issue was deeply personal: she had undergone an illegal abortion at age 22, years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.
Abortion would remain one of the defining causes of her public life.
Steinem became a leading advocate for what supporters described as reproductive freedom and opposed government restrictions on abortion throughout her career.
Her activism coincided with and helped accelerate one of the most significant ideological shifts in modern American politics.
Steinem helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 and co-founded Ms. magazine, which became an influential vehicle for feminist political thought.
The movement she helped build pushed issues including abortion, workplace discrimination, contraception, sexual politics and the Equal Rights Amendment into mainstream national debate.
Over subsequent decades, many of those positions became firmly embedded within Democratic Party politics.
Steinem’s activism also expanded beyond feminism. She became an advocate for civil rights and other progressive causes and remained a recognizable presence in Democratic political circles for decades.
Her rise was not without opposition.
Conservative activists, religious organizations and many traditional women’s groups rejected portions of the second-wave feminist agenda, particularly its positions on abortion, sexuality and the traditional family.
The proposed Equal Rights Amendment became one of the movement’s greatest political battles.
Congress approved the amendment in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification, but it failed to secure the required number of state approvals before the ratification deadline.
The political divide Steinem helped shape remains remarkably recognizable today.
More than 50 years later, abortion continues to divide Republicans and Democrats, while disputes over gender, women’s sports, parental rights and the meaning of legal equality have become central issues in state legislatures, Congress and presidential elections.
The abortion debate changed dramatically in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion established nearly five decades earlier and returning substantial authority over abortion policy to elected governments.
For Steinem, the reversal represented the unraveling of one of the most consequential political victories of the movement she helped lead.
Her standing among progressive political leaders nevertheless remained substantial.
President Barack Obama awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
She continued speaking publicly about women’s rights, abortion and political participation into her later years.
Steinem ultimately lived long enough to see ideas once considered politically revolutionary become standard positions within one of America’s two major political parties, while also witnessing an increasingly organized conservative movement challenge some of those same victories.
That may prove to be the most consequential piece of her legacy.
Gloria Steinem did not simply participate in America’s culture wars.
She helped define them.
And more than half a century after she became one of the faces of the women’s liberation movement, many of the political battles she helped start remain unresolved.
Steinem was 92.
The death of this evil leftard is no loss to society.