Dawn Images

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 years old.

The co-founder and consulting editor of Ms. Magazine championed the feminist movement from the late 1960s onwards and inspired generations of women.

She died on Wednesday, her foundation said in ​an Instagram post on Thursday.

“From reluctant spokesperson to a beacon of positive change, hers is a singular journey — an American leader who can speak to us all,” film and theatre ‌director Julie Taymor said of Steinem in a 2017 New York Times interview.

Taymor directed the 2020 film The Glorias, depicting Steinem’s life across the years and based on her 2015 best-selling autobiography My Life on the Road. She was also the subject of a 2018 play, Gloria: A Life, and a 2011 HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words.

Steinem said she considered herself “an entrepreneur of social change”.

“I want to do justice to the women I meet, to tell their stories,” she told the New Yorker magazine in 2015. “It’s ​making connections, and using myself to listen, because we can’t empower women without listening to their stories.”

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.

Among other groups, she also created the Coalition of Labor ⁠Union Women, the Women’s Media Centre, 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 signature long, blonde-streaked, centre-parted ​hair and aviator glasses, Steinem was the glamorous, hip symbol of the feminist movement, which she emphasised should embrace women of every race.

“If you’ve suffered discrimination, you’re sensitive to it on every level. I learned feminism ​largely from Black women. Women of colour basically invented feminism,” she told the New Yorker.

‘A Bunny’s Tale’

Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the younger of two daughters. Her father was a traveling antique dealer. Because the family moved frequently she did not attend school regularly until about seventh grade.

Her parents separated when she was 11, following which Steinem lived with and took care of her mother, who had a mental breakdown and suffered from depression.

The experience impacted Steinem’s views ​on social injustice and marriage, which she believed robbed women of choices and many of their civil rights.

“I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child, my mother. I didn’t want to end ​up taking care of someone else,” she was quoted as saying.

After graduating from Smith College, Steinem began freelancing as a journalist.

In 1963, she worked as a Playboy bunny for 11 days for a story for Show magazine. Her two-part ‌groundbreaking expose, A Bunny’s ⁠Tale, detailed the poor pay and sexist treatment Playboy bunnies — originally waitstaff — endured. The story was made into a 1985 TV movie starring Kirstie Alley.