Gloria Steinem – the American journalist, author, and activist who was one of the most recognizable and enduring faces of the feminist movement – died at age 92, her foundation announced Thursday.
The announcement sparked an outpouring of tributes honoring her decades of boundary-pushing activism.
Steinem was given numerous awards and honors, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by Barack Obama.
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Obama praised Steinem as a “larger-than-life” figure who “helped awaken us to problems like domestic violence” and discriminatory hiring practices.
“Today, generations of women are walking a little taller and aiming a little higher because of what she fought for and achieved,” the former president posted on X.
Steinem “pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her,” said Hillary Clinton, the first woman to serve as US secretary of state and the country’s first female presidential nominee of a major political party.
Nancy Pelosi, the first female US House speaker, called Steinem “a fearless trailblazer who transformed the fight for equality in America and inspired generations of women to know their power.”
“She lit a torch many years ago. It is now our responsibility to keep it lifted into the future,” said legendary tennis star Billie Jean King, winner of the famed 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match and a prominent advocate for gender equality.
Before becoming a leading figure in the women’s rights movement, Steinem cut her teeth in journalism in the 1960s, denouncing the inequalities American women endured at a time when many needed their husbands’ approval to open a bank account.
She came to prominence in 1963 with an expose about the pervasive sexism faced by cocktail waitresses at New York’s Playboy Club.
But she credited her awakening to activism to a 1969 meeting where women described the ordeal of having an abortion.
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“It made some sense of my own experience. I had had an abortion and had never told anyone,” she later recounted in New York Magazine.
The London doctor who gave her an abortion in 1957, when it was still illegal, made her promise two things: “First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”
In the 1970s, she founded Ms Magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus and organized the first National Women’s Conference in Houston.
Donning her trademark aviator glasses, Steinem headlined conferences and protests in the US and around the world for decades. She remained an outspoken defender of women’s rights well into her later years.
