“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
“Hope is a form of planning.”
And the line she loved to repeat, crediting Australian writer Irina Dunn: “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
For more than half a century, Gloria Steinem gave women the words. Sharp, funny, quotable words that fitted on a placard, a T-shirt or a magazine cover, and that carried a movement. Now, fittingly, she has the last word — quite literally.
Steinem died peacefully on 2 September at her New York City brownstone, aged 92, surrounded, her family said, by some of the many who loved her. The statement announcing her death noted that her near-century on earth was well lived, and that she worked for equality until the very end.
Her Final Interview
The day after her death, Netflix released her episode of Famous Last Words, the series in which subjects sit for a deeply personal interview — recorded behind closed doors, with remotely operated cameras — that is only broadcast after they die. Steinem filmed hers with host Brad Falchuk in February 2025, at the age of 90, becoming the third subject to appear, after Dr Jane Goodall and actor Eric Dane.
It is vintage Gloria: biting, warm and wickedly funny. She dismissed Hugh Hefner, the subject of her famous 1963 undercover exposé of the Playboy Club, as pathetic. She confessed a soft spot for reality television. Asked how she felt about dying, she admitted the sadness came only from missing out on what happens next — then revealed she’d looked up the world’s oldest woman, found one in the Himalayas claiming 135, and declared: “so I have a goal.”
She pushed back, too, on the very title history gave her. She never wanted to be the face of feminism, she said, insisting the movement was always diverse and that her fame owed more to sheer endurance — she simply stayed at it longer than most.
On choosing the harder path of a life devoted to change, she was characteristically brisk: “Doesn’t feel harder. It feels like fun.”
And when the cameras were left running and the room emptied for her final, private message to the world, she began: “Hello, all you unique individuals out there.” She urged us to keep telling our own stories — because knowing each other through stories, she said, is the most important thing we can do for one another. It was a touching moment, and one that is hard to forget and I recommend watching the interview in full.
The Road Through India
Long before Ms. magazine, before the marches and the movement, there was India. After graduating from Smith College in 1956, Steinem spent two years on a Chester Bowles Fellowship, travelling village to village, writing for Indian publications and walking alongside Gandhian organisers campaigning against caste violence.
She always described those years as profoundly formative. India taught her that real change is built from the ground up — in villages, in living rooms, in circles of women talking to each other. It was a lesson she carried home and never let go of, from the “talking circles” she hosted in her own brownstone to her lifelong interest in the shared roots of sex and race caste, a thread she returned to in that final Netflix conversation.
A Life That Changed Ours
Born in Toledo, Ohio, on 25 March 1934, Steinem inherited activism — her grandmother chaired the education committee of the National Women Suffrage Association. Arriving in New York in 1960, she was told by one editor that the magazine needed a reporter, not a pretty girl. She answered with a career: the Playboy Bunny exposé, the co-founding of Ms. magazine in 1972, and decades on the front lines for reproductive freedom — a term she coined — equal pay, and an end to violence against women.
Because of her, women could hold a credit card without a man’s signature, walk into universities that once barred them, and name harassment for what it was. President Barack Obama, awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, credited her work with winning women respect and opportunity across America and around the world.
The Last Word
Asked in Famous Last Words how she hoped to be remembered, Steinem kept it simple: as someone who tried to leave the world “a little more equal, compassionate, joyful, funny” than she found it.
She did all of that, and more. A woman of substance who changed what was possible for every woman who came after her — and who, in the end, made sure the last word was hers.
Vale, Gloria.
