“”The truth will set you free
But first it will piss you off.” 
Gloria Steinem

Last Wednesday, September 2, 2026 the World lost another passionate talented and intelligent woman. Gloria Steinem, the American journalist and political activist who became the face for feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died at age 92.

Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Gloria Marie Steinem inherited an activist tradition. Her grandmother served as chair of the educational committee of the National Women Suffrage Association and also helped rescue members of her family, who were Jewish, from Germany during the mid-1930s.

Steinem graduated from Smith College and moved to New York in 1960, where she was often sexualized and dismissed while searching for reporting jobs in a male-dominated journalism industry. “We need a reporter, not a pretty girl,” she says she was told by an editor at Life Magazine.

By 1962, one of her first articles was published in Esquire Magazine, an exploration of birth control and shifting sexual beliefs among college students. Themes that would continue to appear in her later work.

Gloria’s near century on earth were years well lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end. Steinem was a feminist icon who spent the better part of a century advocating for women’s rights in the workplace, especially equal pay for women as well as the right to abortion and sex education.

Her name and face became synonymous with the fight for women’s rights. She continued to be a vocal proponent of feminism and other liberal causes; like anti-war activism well into her 90s. She devoted her life to the pursuit of equality and political change. She worked tirelessly for over 70 years to ensure each generation built upon the work of the previous one.

I will be forever grateful for her many accomplishments helping woman. She fought so I could choose whatever I wanted to do with my life rather than be confined by traditional gender roles. Something she said that I have lived by is:
“Do what you love so much that you forget what time it is when you’re doing it.”

She changed women’s lives by opening up possibilities we never imagined. “Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.” As she also stated: “Women are not a special interest group; they are half the population.”

She lit a torch many years ago. It is now our responsibility to keep that torch lifted and lit into the future.

Rest in peace Gloria. You will be missed as a champion for woman.

Shine One