Gloria Steinem, Feminist Writer and Activist, Dies at 92
The journalist who went undercover as a Playboy Bunny and became the face of second-wave feminism died at her home in New York City.
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Death Announced on Instagram
Gloria Steinem, the American journalist and feminist campaigner, has died at the age of 92. A statement posted to her official Instagram page said she "passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her."
NBC News reported that the post appeared on Thursday and said she died on Wednesday. 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 statement said. It added that her "greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard."
Her representatives asked supporters to light a candle in her honour and to donate to her charity, Gloria's Foundation. NBC News reported that the statement praised her habit of welcoming hundreds of guests into her living room for what were called "Talking Circles," using her home as a centre for social justice movements.
From Toledo to National Fame
Steinem was born in Ohio in 1934. NBC News gives her birth date as 25 March 1934, in Toledo.
Her early years were spent travelling the country with her parents, Ruth and Leo, and her older sister Susanne, while her father worked as a travelling antiques salesman. The Guardian reports that she grew up in a trailer home. NBC News says she did not attend school regularly until she was 11, after her parents divorced.
The two publications differ slightly on her parents' separation: NBC News says her parents divorced when she was around 11, while the Guardian says they separated when she was 10. Her mother had mental health problems, and Steinem has said that watching doctors dismiss her mother's needs shaped her wish to give women more of a voice.
The Guardian reports that after graduating from a women's liberal arts college in 1956, she spent two years in India working as a legal clerk in the country's supreme court. On returning to the United States she directed the Independent Research Service, described by the Guardian as a CIA front that recruited American students to disrupt Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki. She later said she had always known who was funding it, adding: "If I had a choice I would do it again."
The Playboy Exposé and a Life of Campaigning
Steinem's first brush with national fame came in 1963, when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny and wrote about the poor conditions endured by servers in Hugh Hefner's Playboy clubs. The Guardian says she worked there for 11 days and published the piece in two parts.
The Guardian reports that her first serious journalism assignment came in 1962 from Esquire editor Clay Felker, a feature on contraception titled "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed."
She wrote nine books and campaigned against domestic violence, female genital mutilation, the pornography industry and the Vietnam and Gulf wars, according to the Guardian, which adds that she was arrested in 1984 while protesting against apartheid outside the South African embassy in Washington DC. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour.
The New York Post reports that she battled breast cancer in the 1980s and was diagnosed in the 1990s with trigeminal neuralgia, a painful nerve condition. She married for the first time at 66, wedding the businessman and environmentalist David Bale, father of the actor Christian Bale, in 2000. She had no children of her own and became stepmother to Bale's four children.
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