Remembering Gloria Steinem: A Life Dedicated to Radical Equality
Gloria Steinem got 92 years on this earth. She spent most of them doing what the men who still run this country refuse to do: treating women as full human beings.
Harrison Lockwood, Lead Columnist on Systemic Justice & Climate Action·updated September 03, 2026
Her foundation announced Thursday that she died peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by friends and family, according to reporting from the BBC and the Guardian. She kept working for equality, her foundation said, until the very end.
What she built — and what they took back
Steinem didn't theorize liberation from an ivory tower. She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 to expose the exploitation inside Hugh Hefner's clubs, losing ten pounds in eleven days because the costume kept getting cinched tighter. She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972, one of the first mainstream publications to treat women as something other than homemakers and beauty products. She coined the term "reproductive freedom" while covering an abortion speakout in 1968, the same year she had the procedure herself in London and later described it as the moment her life as an "active feminist" began.
She lived long enough to see the Supreme Court hand down Roe v. Wade in 1973 — and long enough to watch it get ripped away. That reversal sits at the center of her legacy: a half-century of organizing, and the material conditions for women across much of this country still depend on which state legislature despises them least.
The unfinished extraction
Steinem's work was never single-issue. She campaigned against female genital mutilation, the pornography industry, the death penalty, apartheid (she was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington in 1984), the wars in Vietnam and the Gulf, and for LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and equal pay. Her activism traced one consistent thread: the systems that devalue certain bodies so others can extract profit and power from them.
She once said that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. She was right, and the backlash against reproductive autonomy in the years since has only confirmed it. The terrain she helped clear is being fought over right now, state by state, ballot by ballot.
Her foundation said her greatest gift was making people feel seen and heard. That matters. But the structures she spent her life challenging are still standing, and they don't care how beloved the woman who opposed them was. The work continues, and it always did.