The Promise She Kept for Seventy Years

Gloria Steinem died on 2 September, at ninety-two. She spent her life doing what a London doctor asked of her in 1957: telling the truth, and doing what she wanted with her life.
By Teona Abuladze · 9 min read

In 1957 a twenty-two-year-old American woman sat in a doctor’s office in London.
She had broken off an engagement at home and was about to leave for India. She was also pregnant, and abortion was illegal.
The doctor agreed to help her. But he asked for two things in return.
First: that she never tell anyone his name.
Second: that she do what she wanted with her life.
Nearly fifty years later, Gloria Steinem dedicated her memoir to him. “I’ve done the best I could with my life,” she wrote. “This book is for you.”
She died on Wednesday, at ninety-two, at her home in New York, surrounded — as the statement from her foundation put it — by some of the many who loved her.
She kept both promises.
The reporter nobody would take seriously
Before she was an icon she was a journalist who couldn’t get the assignments she wanted.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. Her father left; her mother suffered from mental illness, and Gloria, as a teenager, was the one who cared for her. She got herself to Smith College, graduated magna cum laude, then spent two years in India on a fellowship — an experience that shaped how she thought about organising for the rest of her life.
Back in New York she wanted to write about politics. Editors gave her articles about stockings and celebrities.
So in 1963 she did something that would define her career and follow her forever: she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny.
The resulting exposé described what those jobs actually involved — the costumes that damaged the women’s bodies, the humiliating physical requirements, the pay that never matched the promise, the harassment treated as part of the role.
It made her famous. It also made serious editors take her less seriously for years, because she had, in their eyes, become the story rather than reported it. She said later that she’d regretted writing it — and then, as the piece kept mattering, stopped regretting it.
What she actually built
It’s easy to remember Steinem as a face — the centre parting, the aviator glasses, the woman on every talk show.
Look at what she made instead.
In 1971 she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, to get women into elected office.
In 1972 she co-founded Ms., the first mainstream American magazine run by women, for women, about women’s lives as they actually were. The preview issue sold out in days.
She helped found the Ms. Foundation for Women, which funds women’s organisations, and later the Women’s Media Center.
And she spent five decades on the road. College campuses, community centres, church halls, rallies. She kept doing it into her nineties, and she was clear about why:
“You can’t do it on the phone or on the web. You have to be there with all five senses. People can’t empathise with each other unless we’re in the same room.”
The world before
For anyone under forty it can be difficult to feel how recent all of this is.
When Steinem began, an American woman generally could not get a credit card without a man’s signature. She could be refused entry to Ivy League universities. She could be fired for being pregnant. She could not legally end a pregnancy. Marital rape was not a crime in most states. Job advertisements were printed in separate columns: Help Wanted — Male and Help Wanted — Female.
None of that changed because society matured. It changed because organised women spent decades making it change, in courts, legislatures, newsrooms and living rooms.
Steinem was at the front of that for over sixty years.
The abortion she didn’t talk about for decades
She had that abortion at twenty-two, in London, and did not speak about it publicly for a very long time.
Then, in 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out in New York — a room of women stating plainly, in public, what had been done to them and what they had done. Women testifying about something that was, at the time, illegal and unspeakable.
“That speak-out was the beginning of activism for me,” she said.
She wasn’t converted by an argument. She was converted by hearing women tell the truth in a room, out loud, to each other. That remained her method for the rest of her life: get women in a room, let them talk, and something shifts that no essay can shift.
In 2022, weeks before Roe v. Wade was overturned, she was still saying it.
What she was actually like
Two things get lost in the icon.
The first is the humour. She was funny — sharply, unsentimentally funny, for six decades, in an argument that gave her very little reason to be. On being criticised, in 2020: “If Trump spoke well of me, I would shoot myself.”
The second is the listening. Her foundation’s statement named it as her greatest gift: the ability to listen to others, to make people feel seen and heard, to give them permission to be themselves.
That’s an unusual thing to be remembered for, in a movement’s most famous public speaker. It also explains the fifty years on the road. She described herself in The New Yorker not as a leader but as “an entrepreneur of social change”: “I raise money. I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet.”
Where she got it wrong, and why that matters
She would not want a tribute that made her flawless, and Shansi doesn’t write those.
Steinem was criticised — with reason — for a feminism that at times centred white, educated, middle-class women, and she was challenged on it repeatedly, particularly by Black feminists who had been organising just as long with a fraction of the attention. She responded by working alongside women like Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Flo Kennedy, and by ceding platforms she could easily have kept. She got things wrong publicly and corrected them publicly.
She also became so recognisable that her fame sometimes obscured the collective work behind her — a problem she named herself, repeatedly, and never entirely solved.
None of that diminishes the life. It just makes it a real one.
The candle
Her foundation asked for something unusual in its announcement. Steinem loved the old tradition of lighting signal fires on hilltops, to show the way to the other side of the mountain.
“Lighting your own candle for Gloria makes you part of this global and celestial community circle.”
That is a very precise image for what she actually did. Not a leader at the front. A fire on a hill, lit so that someone further back could see where the path went.
She kept working until the end. Her foundation’s words: her near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end.
Two promises
A doctor in London asked a frightened twenty-two-year-old for two things.
Don’t tell anyone my name. And do what you want with your life.
She did the second so thoroughly that millions of women got to do it too — got credit cards, degrees, jobs, choices, divorces, magazines, the right to say out loud what had happened to them.
Shansi means chance. Hers was given to her in an illegal consulting room by a man who asked only that she use it.
Ninety-two years. She used it.

Sources: CNN; NPR; NBC News; ABC News; TIME; the Associated Press; The New Yorker, Jane Kramer’s 2015 profile; statements from Gloria Steinem’s foundation and official accounts, 3 September 2026.