Gloria Steinem
United States
Gloria Steinem was the most visible face of American second-wave feminism for more than fifty years — a journalist first, who went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963, co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972, and spent the following decades organising, speaking and listening her way across the country. She campaigned on reproductive freedom, domestic violence and workplace inequality, and lived to see rights she had fought for become unremarkable: a credit card without a husband’s signature, a place at a university that had barred women, a legal abortion.
She kept working into her nineties, and was clear that ageing had made her freer rather than smaller — “the woman I wanted to become” was how she put it. Her memoir My Life on the Road is on CroneHub; a final memoir, An Unexpected Life, was due for publication weeks after her death.
Gloria Steinem died at her home in New York City on 3 September 2026, aged 92.
