Gloria Steinem

Gloria Marie Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to Ruth and Leo Steinem — a father who worked as a traveling antique dealer and a mother who had once been a journalist before illness narrowed her world. The family moved often in a trailer, following warmer weather, and when her parents divorced in 1944, eleven-year-old Gloria took on the weight of caring for her mother, whose severe mental illness shaped the family's days. It was this early experience of a woman whose ambitions had been quietly extinguished that would fuel everything Gloria later fought for. She escaped to Smith College in 1952, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in government, and then traveled to India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship, spending two transformative years studying at the Universities of Delhi and Calcutta. Watching Gandhian organizers work at the grassroots level, she learned what a movement actually looked like from the ground up. Back in New York by 1960, Steinem carved a path as a freelance journalist in newsrooms that barely had room for women. Her 1963 undercover exposé "A Bunny's Tale" — in which she worked inside a Playboy Club to document exploitation and poverty wages — brought her national attention, though it frustrated her to be seen as a stunt rather than a reporter. She helped found New York magazine in 1968, and a year later, attending a Redstockings abortion speak-out, she publicly shared her own experience and found her cause. In 1971 she co-founded Ms. magazine with Patricia Carbine and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. The preview issue, 300,000 copies, sold out in days. For the first time, a national magazine put reproductive rights, domestic violence, and workplace equality on its cover and kept them there. The organizations she co-founded alongside Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Jane Fonda, and others — the National Women's Political Caucus, the Women's Media Center, Voters for Choice — became pillars of the American feminist infrastructure. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She married David Bale in a Cherokee ceremony in September 2000 and lost him to illness in 2003. She kept working. Her brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where she hosted decades of "Talking Circles," remained a living room for the movement until the end. Gloria Steinem died peacefully at her New York City home on September 2, 2026, at age 92, surrounded by those she loved. She was still writing. Her final memoir, "An Unexpected Life," was published three weeks later.