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Ms. Magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem dies at 92
September 3, 2026
Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who co-founded Ms. Magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus, has died at 92.
NPR reports that Steinem, a journalist and activist, has died at 92, and that from the 1960s she challenged gender stereotypes and championed equality, sisterhood and reproductive freedom. CBS News, CNBC and Reuters carry the same account. CNBC reports her birth in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, and NPR reports the two years she spent in India on a fellowship, travelling with people organizing against caste violence, an experience she said shaped her activism at home. CBS News reports that she co-founded Ms. Magazine, the first major publication owned, run and written by women. NPR describes the same magazine as the first national one run by and written for women. The wording differs and the claim is the same, so the outlets agree.
The institutions she built are firm in the record. CNBC reports the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971 with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, and CBS News reports the Ms. Foundation for Women in 1973 with Marlo Thomas, Patricia Carbine and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. NPR reports the Presidential Medal of Freedom that then-President Barack Obama awarded her in 2013. CBS News quotes her in 2006 saying, "There's a barrier that has moved, but there's still a barrier." CNBC quotes her 1972 National Press Club speech calling Nixon "the most sexually insecure chief of state since Napoleon." Reuters carries the death itself.
One detail of her private life does not line up. One account puts her marriage at 2000, at the age of 66, to the British activist and businessman David Bale, whom she met at a fundraiser. A competing account does not carry those particulars, and neither side explains where its figures come from. Her death, her age, the founding of Ms. Magazine and the groups she helped start are reported across the outlets. The marriage particulars are what the record leaves open.
Still developing
The record does not agree on her marriage to David Bale, where the figures do not line up between the accounts.