Gloria Steinem, the Feminist Icon Who Marched Alongside Latinas Like Dolores Huerta for Decades, Has Died at 92

Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City on September 2nd, 2026, at the age of 92, surrounded by loved ones. Her foundation announced the news on social media without specifying a cause of death. The woman who became the defining face of second-wave feminism in the United States spent nearly a century building a movement that was, at its best, a coalition of women from every background, and the Latinas who shaped her thinking and stood beside her on picket lines deserve to be part of the conversation about what she left behind.

Steinem broke into mainstream journalism in the 1960s with her undercover investigation into the exploitation of women working at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs, published as “A Bunny’s Tale.” She later co-founded New York magazine and Ms. magazine, creating a dedicated platform for women’s issues outside the traditional spheres of beauty and housekeeping that dominated women’s media at the time. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Action Alliance, traveled the country for decades as a lecturer and organizer and continued writing until the end of her life. Her home in her later years became a gathering place for social justice movements, where she held regular Talking Circles for visitors and activists.

The Partnership That Changed Both Women

The most consequential relationship Steinem had with a Latina activist was her partnership with Dolores Huerta, and the story of how it began is worth telling in full. When Huerta arrived in New York City in the late 1960s to coordinate the East Coast front of the National Boycott of California Table Grapes, her focus was entirely economic: convince East Coast consumers to stop buying grapes and force growers to pay a minimum wage. Steinem, who had initially been intimidated by Huerta’s fierce reputation, stepped in to leverage her media connections in a way that changed the trajectory of the boycott.

Steinem persuaded Huntington Hartford, the millionaire heir to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company’s supermarket fortune, to actively protest his own family’s grocery stores. The move generated massive media coverage and established a bond between the two women that lasted decades. They stood on picket lines together regularly, and Steinem credited Huerta with teaching mainstream white feminists how to use direct physical grassroots action to make their voices heard collectively.

Before working with Steinem, Huerta had dismissed the women’s liberation movement as a middle-class phenomenon with little relevance to the farmworker struggle. Working alongside Steinem changed her perspective. She began to see how deeply gender discrimination was embedded within the labor and civil rights movements themselves, observing that women who organized strikes and ran boycotts were consistently excluded from leadership positions. She started calling herself a born-again feminist and began fighting sexism within the United Farm Workers with the same intensity she brought to labor organizing. The influence ran in both directions. Huerta pushed Steinem to understand that true liberation had to encompass race, class and labor rights, and together they modeled intersectional activism decades before that phrase entered common usage.

How She Showed Up for the Latina Community

Beyond her partnership with Huerta, Steinem engaged consistently with Latina students, activists and organizers throughout her career. She campaigned alongside first-generation Latina students, publicly acknowledged the growing impact of the Latina vote in U.S. elections and met regularly with young Latina high school students forming feminist organizations at their schools. In the 1970s, as groups like the Latin Women’s Collective formed to address anti-imperialist, anti-racist and gender struggles simultaneously, Steinem marched beside Latina organizers and co-campaigned with them on issues including the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The National Women’s Political Caucus, which she co-founded in 1971, was built explicitly to ensure multi-racial representation in political office.

Her later memoirs and public work focused heavily on listening to and building coalitions with women of color, with Steinem acknowledging openly that the broader feminist movement depended on diverse leadership to survive and grow. She understood, with Huerta’s help, that a feminism that centered only on white middle-class women’s concerns was not feminism at all but a narrower project dressed in universalist language.

What She Leaves Behind

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remembered Steinem as a key architect of women’s equality whose fierce activism was always rooted in an unwavering optimism about what was possible. That optimism showed up in how she spent her time even in her final years, writing, hosting, listening and organizing with the same energy she had brought to the movement decades earlier.

Steinem lived long enough to see many of the battles she fought become law and then become contested again, which gives her legacy a complexity that a simple obituary cannot fully capture. The women who worked alongside her, including Dolores Huerta and the countless Latina organizers who brought labor rights and racial justice into the feminist conversation, are as much a part of what second-wave feminism accomplished as Steinem herself. Remembering her life honestly means remembering theirs too.