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Eating breakfast in a South Dakota coffee shop, Gloria Steinem was all too aware of the couple eyeballing her from the next booth. He was sporting chains. She wore leather pants and what Steinem later recalled as “an improbable hairdo.” The place was packed with tough-looking, mostly male bikers pumped about a huge rally they were attending. Steinem, returning from a Sioux powwow honoring ancient tribal women, knew she wasn’t in her element.
Finally, the leather-clad woman came over and spoke up. “I just want to tell you how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years — and my husband too,” she told an astonished Steinem.
There was a time, the woman said, when rolling down the road meant perching on her husband’s back seat. But now she had her own sweet ride: “I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate, and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”
The image of that breezy, boisterous grandma stayed with Steinem for years. “I’ve come to believe that inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir. “We have only to discover it — and ride.”
Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. Magazine and for six decades a charismatic leader who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her foundation’s social media pages. She was 92.
“Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the posts said.
An activist, journalist and relentless traveler who said she went for 20 years without spending more than eight consecutive days in her storied Manhattan apartment, Steinem was a glamorous and polarizing icon who used her fabled beauty, wit and charisma to inaugurate a new politics for women.
“It’s such a cliche, but the personal is the political, and there was no separation between those concepts for her,” said fellow writer and longtime friend Salamishah Tillet. “Gloria said feminism is something that you practice every day, something that you practice in private when no cameras are watching you, no pulpit is there for you to stand behind, no microphone is capturing the soundbite.”
The world’s most recognizable feminist was always herself, friends and scholars said, even as she evolved from the face of the Second Wave to an elder of a fractious and contested movement. Throughout her long public life, she regularly opened her East 73rd Street home to fundraisers and “talking circles,” book launches and baby showers, equally at ease in tête-à-têtes with public intellectuals and watching Tillet’s toddler jump on her bed.
“My sister was like, ‘Do you know whose bed you’re on?’” Tillet recalled. “And Gloria’s like, ‘It’s fine.’”
Despite her singular fame, Steinem rarely took the stage alone, amplifying the work of contemporaries such as Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Dolores Huerta and Wilma Mankiller, as well as generations of feminists who followed.
“Gloria often said she wasn’t giving up a torch. She was using her torch to light other torches,” said Michele Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown and the executive producer of Ms. Studios. “We bandy about the term intersectional, but she truly understood what that was.”
It was an improbable turn for a shy girl from Ohio who styled herself after Truman Capote’s socialite sex-worker Holly Golightly and rocketed to fame skewering her two-week stint serving cocktails in a cheeky, fluffy-tailed bustier as a Playboy “bunny” in Hugh Hefner’s Manhattan nightclub.
