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Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist whose name became inseparable from the modern women’s rights movement, has died at 92.
Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York City, surrounded by loved ones, according to an announcement from her foundation. A cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
With her large aviator glasses, calm delivery, and sharp wit, Steinem helped bring issues once dismissed as “women’s problems” into mainstream political debate. She spoke openly about equal pay, reproductive freedom, sexual harassment, and the unequal burden women carried at home, subjects that were still considered radical when she began writing about them.
She first attracted widespread attention in 1963 after going undercover as a Playboy Bunny to expose the treatment and working conditions of women employed at the clubs.
But it was as a co-founder of Ms. magazine in 1972 that Steinem found her most influential platform. The publication gave women space to discuss their lives without being confined to fashion, cooking or advice on pleasing a husband, the usual formula for women’s magazines at the time.
She also helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and several other organizations promoting women’s participation in public life. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
For women in Cyprus, Steinem’s story may appear rooted in a distant American era. Yet the battles she pushed into public view remain strikingly familiar: unequal pay, workplace discrimination, domestic violence, political underrepresentation, and the expectation that women should quietly manage careers, homes, children, and aging parents without complaint.
Her legacy was not that she settled those arguments. It was that she made it far harder to pretend they did not exist.
Steinem remained politically active into her 90s, continuing to write, speak, and encourage younger women to challenge systems they were told simply to accept.
She leaves behind no children, but generations of women inherited the space she helped create, the freedom to speak up, demand more and refuse to apologize for it.
*With information from Reuters and AP News
