On a Wednesday evening in New York City, in the home where she had continued writing until the very end, Gloria Steinem died peacefully at the age of 92. Her foundation announced the news on Thursday, describing a life that had remained in motion — intellectually and politically — long after most public figures had retreated into comfortable silence. "Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humour," the statement read. Few obituaries have been so easy to believe.

Steinem's path to becoming the most recognisable face of American feminism was neither straight nor comfortable. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1935, she spent her childhood in near-constant movement, accompanying a father who traded antiques across state lines. When her parents separated, she was eleven years old and was left, in effect, to care for a mother whose depression had rendered her largely unable to function. That early, unwanted responsibility would later inform everything she wrote and argued: that social structures — marriage chief among them — had long stripped women of choice, autonomy, and civil rights.

She entered journalism through the back door. In 1963, she took a job as a Playboy Bunny and then turned the experience into a blistering exposé, "A Bunny's Tale", that documented the poor pay and routine humiliation endured by the women who worked there. She helped found New York Magazine in 1968, and her essay "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" established her as a serious intellectual force within the feminist movement. A year later, attending an abortion speak-out in a New York church, her activism accelerated into something that would not stop for decades.