Gloria Steinem, fierce feminist trailblazer, dies age 92 - NBC News

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Gloria Steinem, the indefatigable feminist and journalist whose activism revolutionized the personal and professional lives of women, has died.

Steinem “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” a post on her official Instagram page said Thursday. It added that she died Wednesday, although it did not give a cause of death.

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the post said.

She “lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the statement added. It hailed her ability to welcome hundreds of guests into her living room for “Talking Circles” and was committed to using her home as a “center for social justice movements.”

Her representatives asked her fans to light a candle in her honor and for donations to be made to her charity, Gloria’s Foundation.

Steinem dedicated her life to causes ranging from reproductive freedom and domestic violence prevention to fighting workplace gender inequalities.

She was the face of a movement that radically changed rights for women so they could eventually apply for credit cards without a man’s signature, be admitted to Ivy League schools that previously barred them, and legally get an abortion in the United States.

A pioneer of the 1960s era of second-wave feminism, Steinem advocated for social issues, as well as wrote about them.

Her first brush with national fame came in 1963, when she went undercover as a Playboy bunny and wrote an exposé about the poor working conditions that the servers in Hugh Hefner’s famed Playboy clubs endured.

Steinem earned some of the highest recognitions possible, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor.

But she came from humble beginnings — and had an unusual childhood.

Steinem, born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, and her older sister, Susanne, spent much of their early years crisscrossing the country with their parents, Leo and Ruth Steinem, who brought the family with him for his job as a traveling antiques salesman.

Steinem did not attend school regularly until she was 11, after her parents divorced and she had moved back to Ohio with her mother.

Ruth Steinem had mental health problems, something Steinem has said deeply influenced her. Seeing doctors dismiss her mother’s needs contributed to her desire to get women more of a voice in society. And being forced to care for her mother deterred her from wanting children of her own.

I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child — my mother.

“I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child — my mother,” she told People magazine in 1992. “I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else.”

In 1956, Steinem graduated from Smith College, the all-women’s liberal arts school in Massachusetts, with a degree in government — an uncommon major for women then. While overseas in London at age 22 after graduation, she discovered she was carrying an unwanted pregnancy.

“I had all the usual fantasies — maybe if I go horseback riding, maybe if I throw myself down the stairs,” she recalled to NPR in 2021.

Abortions were illegal at the time, but by “sheer luck,” she said, she found a physician who directed her to a doctor who was secretly doing abortions. She dedicated her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to the doctor who referred her to the woman who performed her abortion.

Steinem’s abortion spurred her lifelong interest in reproductive rights, but she did not publicly reveal that she had had it until 1969.

In 2019, she told Al Jazeera it bothered her that the debate was framed as “pro-choice” versus “pro-life” and said no one is “pro” abortion.

“Nobody would choose one if they didn’t have to,” she said.

Steinem spent two years in India on a fellowship after she graduated from college and later went to New York to pursue journalism, a field in which she struggled to be taken seriously as a woman.

It wasn’t until her blockbuster piece on Playboy bunnies was published in 1963 in Show magazine that she gained recognition.