Gloria Steinem, who co-founded Ms. magazine and became the most recognisable figure of American second-wave feminism, died on 2 September 2026 at the age of 92.

She was a columnist for New York magazine in her thirties when she helped launch a publication intended to move feminism from movement politics into the mainstream of American reading.

What Ms. was for

Founding a magazine sounds like a modest achievement beside legislation or litigation. In the early 1970s it was neither modest nor obvious. Women’s magazines existed in large numbers and were built around domestic advice and advertising for household goods; the commercial assumption was that a general-interest publication addressing women as political subjects had no market.

Ms. tested that assumption and disproved it, and in doing so it changed which arguments were considered publishable. It ran material on subjects that mainstream outlets did not then cover directly — workplace discrimination, domestic violence, reproductive rights — and it did so in a format that sat on ordinary newsstands.

The journalism before the movement

Steinem’s early reputation came from reporting. Her 1963 account of working undercover as a Playboy Bunny documented the conditions of the job from inside, and it remains a case study in a particular kind of participatory reporting — one that cost her serious assignments for years afterwards, because editors decided she had made herself the story.

That episode is a useful corrective to the tidier version of her life. She became a movement figure partly because the journalism establishment of the period had limited room for a woman who had written that piece.

The criticisms, which she outlived

An honest account has to include the arguments made against her, because they shaped the movement she is identified with.

Black feminists and women of colour argued through the 1970s and after that the mainstream feminism Ms. represented centred the concerns of white, college-educated, middle-class women, and that the media’s elevation of a single recognisable spokeswoman obscured organisers who had been doing the work longer and with fewer resources. Critics on the right argued that the movement’s policy programme misread what most women wanted from their lives. Later feminists disagreed with her on sex work, on pornography, and on generational questions she addressed with varying success.

Steinem engaged with a good deal of that criticism publicly over five decades, changing some positions and holding others. What is not seriously disputed is the scale of the shift in what American women could expect from employers, banks, courts and universities between 1970 and now, and that she was among the people who argued that shift into existence.

Sources

• CBS News, on Gloria Steinem’s death on 2 September 2026 and archive material on the founding of Ms. magazine
• Published biographical accounts of Steinem’s journalism and the history of Ms.