“If I had been told my fight would still be relevant in 2023”: Feminist icon Gloria Steinem dies at 92

Gloria Steinem never drove. She owned neither a car nor a motorcycle, yet the journalist and feminist activist spent her life on the road, relying on taxis, planes and other people for transportation across a country where individual mobility is often treated as a form of emancipation.

Steinem died in New York on Wednesday, Sept. 2, at the age of 92, according to a message posted on her Instagram account by people close to her. Until the end, she continued to insist on the duty of activism and vigilance.

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If I had been told my fight would still be relevant in 2023.

She preferred taxis and airplanes because conversations with taxi drivers and flight attendants, she said, offered an ideal way to take “the pulse of a nation.” Those encounters became part of the perspective behind her 2019 autobiography, “My Life on the Road.”

Her death closes the life of a journalist and campaigner whose work remained tied to the question of how much activism is still required. The title’s continuing relevance is captured in the words: “If I had been told my fight would still be relevant in 2023.”

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the pulse of a nation