Gloria Steinem Has Died. What Remains After the Icon?

Gloria Steinem spent her life questioning the images society constructs around women. The risk now is that she will be reduced to one of them.

Gloria Steinem died on September 2, 2026, at her home in New York City. She was 92. For almost sixty years she had been one of the most recognisable figures of American feminism: a writer, journalist, organiser, co-founder of Ms. magazine and a constant presence in struggles over reproductive freedom, political representation and women’s control over their own lives. She became so recognisable that, long before her death, she had also become an image. Perhaps that is precisely where we should begin.

If you’re new to this wider project, start here: Feminism in Art Isn’t a Style: It’s a Battle Over Visibility.

You can also browse the full archive in my Feminism category.

What happens when a feminist becomes an icon?

Steinem spent much of her life questioning the images imposed on women. The risk now is that she herself will be compressed into a small collection of familiar signs: the aviator glasses, the parted hair, the photographs from the 1970s, the quotations repeated whenever feminism needs a recognisable face. None of those images is false. The problem is that an image can become so familiar that it no longer disturbs anyone.

An icon is easier to celebrate than a political argument. It can be printed, exhibited, quoted and admired without requiring institutions to change. Steinem can be remembered as an inspiring woman while the structures she spent her life confronting remain largely intact. By placing one exceptionally visible woman at the centre of the story, history can also obscure the collective movement around her.

Steinem worked beside figures including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Florynce Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Wilma Mankiller and many organisers whose names never acquired the same cultural familiarity. Her visibility mattered, but it was never the movement by itself. She repeatedly described social change as collective work rather than the achievement of a solitary leader.

The Playboy Bunny and the manufacture of femininity

In 1963, Steinem entered the Playboy Club in New York under an assumed identity and worked there for eleven days. Her investigation, published as A Bunny’s Tale, exposed what the club’s polished fantasy concealed: surveillance, sexual harassment, exhausting physical requirements, precarious pay and detailed rules governing women’s bodies. The investigation made her famous, but it also damaged her credibility with editors who were more interested in the Bunny costume than in the journalism. The image threatened to consume the writer who had exposed it.

The mechanism she uncovered was brutally efficient. First, a culture manufactures an image of desirable femininity. Then it recruits real women to perform that image, adjusting, monitoring and disciplining their bodies until the fantasy appears natural. Playboy did not simply sell photographs of women. It sold a model of femininity created for male consumption and presented as female freedom.

Steinem’s report revealed the labour required to maintain that fantasy. The smile, the costume and the controlled gestures were not spontaneous expressions of sexuality, but conditions of employment. The same mechanism appears repeatedly in visual culture: an image is constructed, circulated and normalised until the woman represented by it is judged according to how successfully she resembles the fiction.

Who builds the images through which women are seen?

It is useful to read Steinem through art because Western art spent centuries participating in the construction of those images. Museums have always contained women: naked women, saints, mothers, prostitutes, allegories, muses and lovers. Far less often were women the ones deciding how bodies should be represented, which experiences could become artistic subjects, which works entered collections and whose histories deserved preservation.

The issue was never simply whether women appeared in art. Women were everywhere in art. The issue was who controlled the meaning of their appearance. This is the argument at the centre of Feminist Art: When “Women’s Work” Becomes a Weapon Against the Art Hierarchy. Feminist art did not merely add female artists to an existing structure. It challenged the hierarchy that had separated art from craft, public history from domestic experience and supposedly universal culture from women’s lives.

What did Gloria Steinem see inside Womanhouse?

In 1972, Steinem visited Womanhouse, the landmark project developed in Los Angeles by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and the students of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts. A dilapidated house became a complete artistic environment in which kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and cupboards were transformed into works about domestic labour, marriage, menstruation, sexuality, motherhood, confinement and the psychological architecture of the home.

These subjects had often been dismissed as private, minor or insufficiently artistic. Womanhouse made them impossible to separate from politics. Years later, while introducing Judy Chicago at the Hammer Museum, Steinem recalled that she could divide her life, and her understanding of art, into a period before and after that encounter. Before entering Womanhouse, she said, art had seemed to be what European men produced, while the work of women and non-European cultures was classified as craft.

Walking through the house, she recognised something that should have been obvious but had been culturally suppressed: women had symbols too. This was not simply an aesthetic revelation, but a discovery about authority. Who had been permitted to transform experience into a symbol, and who had been allowed to call that transformation art? The relationship between feminist art, domestic space and institutional power is explored further in Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party: The Feminist Artwork That Forced Museums to Change.

Kara Walker and the violence inside the beautiful image

A few decades after Womanhouse, Kara Walker brought a related question into another violent area of American history. Her monumental black silhouettes initially resemble the elegant profile portraits and decorative cut-paper traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their visual refinement draws the viewer closer. Only then do the scenes reveal slavery, sexual violence, racial caricature, humiliation, domination and revenge.

Walker does not remove the stereotypes through which Black bodies were represented. She takes possession of them, enlarges them and forces them into scenes where their brutality can no longer pretend to be innocent. The silhouette denies the viewer many of the details normally used to stabilise identity. Faces become profiles, bodies become signs, and race, sex and violence must be interpreted through gestures that are simultaneously precise and ambiguous.

Steinem and Walker belong to different generations and political histories, and their work cannot be collapsed into the same experience. Yet both confront a question that remains urgent: who built the image through which we look at another person, and what happens when the person trapped inside that image begins to manipulate it?

Did feminism win the battle for visibility?

A great deal has changed since Steinem began her work. Women artists are more present in museums, collections are being reconsidered, forgotten figures are being recovered, and feminist art has entered academic programmes, biennials, archives and major exhibitions. The art system now speaks constantly about gender, identity, discrimination, inclusion and historical correction.

We see more: violence against women, statistics on inequality, femicide, reproductive restrictions, workplace discrimination and disparities inside museum collections. We see wars almost in real time, followed by bodies, evidence and testimony circulating without interruption. Visibility has increased enormously, but consequence has not increased at the same speed.

A museum can organise a major feminist exhibition while leaving most of its internal power relations untouched. It can rediscover a forgotten woman artist without seriously investigating the system that erased her. It can display feminist protest while continuing to allocate money, authority and permanent space according to older hierarchies. Representation can change much faster than structure.

The Guerrilla Girls have spent four decades exposing this contradiction. Museums may collect their feminist posters and invite the collective into exhibitions while the inequalities documented by those same posters continue inside collections and leadership structures. The protest enters the museum, but the museum does not necessarily surrender its power.

From visibility to consequence

Steinem was not simply working to make women more visible. Ms. was not created merely to place more female faces inside a magazine. It changed who could produce public discourse and which experiences could be treated as political knowledge. Likewise, the struggle over abortion was not about making private experiences visible. Women had always known what unwanted pregnancy, illegal abortion and reproductive control meant. The political objective was to turn those experiences into rights, protection and bodily autonomy.

The presence of women in politics was not a matter of adding female faces to official photographs. Steinem helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus because representation had to reach the rooms where laws, resources and public priorities were decided. This is the distinction between visibility and consequence: being seen is not the same as possessing the power to change what happens next.

The distinction concerns contemporary art directly. Political art has become extremely skilled at showing war, migration, racism, colonial violence, ecological destruction, trauma and gender inequality. It makes hidden realities visible and produces increasingly sophisticated forms of documentation. The more difficult question, however, is what that visibility actually changes.

How does the art system neutralise political resistance?

The art system has an extraordinary ability to absorb what challenges it. Protest becomes an exhibition, revolt becomes an archive, trauma becomes curatorial language, and institutional criticism becomes an institutional programme. Something created to disturb can be documented, historicised and eventually made compatible with the structure it originally opposed.

This does not mean political art is useless. Visibility can preserve testimony, build solidarity and create a language for experiences that have been denied. It becomes insufficient when institutions use representation as evidence that transformation has already occurred.

A feminist exhibition is not the same as a feminist institution. Acquiring works by women does not automatically change who controls the acquisition budget. Celebrating a radical historical figure does not guarantee that contemporary artists working outside established networks will receive access, credibility or resources.

The difference lies in consequence. Who received power? What rule changed? Which resource was redistributed? Who can now enter a space that was previously closed? Without those questions, visibility risks becoming institutional self-congratulation.

Was Gloria Steinem’s visibility also a problem?

A critical account of Steinem cannot ignore the complications surrounding her position. The American media frequently presented a broad and internally diverse women’s movement through the image of one conventionally attractive, white, middle-class woman. This made feminist arguments accessible to audiences that might otherwise have rejected them, but it also risked marginalising Black, working-class, Indigenous, lesbian and radical feminist voices whose work was essential to the movement.

Steinem did not invent that media hierarchy, and she repeatedly used her platform to support other organisers. Her long collaborations with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Florynce Kennedy and Wilma Mankiller complicate any attempt to present her feminism as an isolated personal brand. Yet the tension remains instructive because visibility is never distributed innocently.

The media selects the face it considers most recognisable, acceptable or marketable. That face can become a gateway, but it can also become a substitute for everyone standing around it. The question is not whether Steinem deserved her visibility. The question is what her visibility allowed others to see, and whom it may have made more difficult to notice.

What remains after Gloria Steinem?

After Steinem’s death there will inevitably be more photographs, documentaries, books, exhibitions and quotations. Her final memoir, An Unexpected Life, will appear posthumously in September 2026, while her New York home is intended to continue as a centre for feminist organising. There is nothing wrong with preserving her image or studying her life. Memory is necessary, but the problem begins when memory replaces the question.

An icon can be celebrated without remaining dangerous. A photograph of Gloria Steinem can hang on a museum wall while the structures she challenged continue almost untouched. An institution can speak continuously about inclusion without changing the mechanisms that produce exclusion. Perhaps Steinem’s legacy lies precisely in refusing that comfort.

Her work was not simply about making visible what had been hidden, but about asking what should happen afterwards. Who made these rules? Who benefits from them? Who remains outside? Who is permitted to speak, and who possesses the resources to turn speech into action? Once all of this becomes visible, are we actually prepared to change it?

The icon is not the conclusion

Gloria Steinem has died, and her image will probably become even more visible now. It will circulate through newspapers, social media, documentaries, memorials and museum programmes. The glasses and hair will make her instantly identifiable, while her words will be separated from speeches and transformed into shareable fragments.

Steinem’s political importance did not lie in being recognisable. It lay in helping people recognise the structures that governed their lives and in building organisations capable of confronting them. The real measure of her legacy will not be the number of times her image is reproduced, but whether reproductive freedom, political power, economic independence and cultural authority remain matters of collective action rather than commemorative language.

It would be a strange paradox if Gloria Steinem became more visible in death while the political consequences of her work became easier to avoid.

Read Gloria Steinem in her own words

Published posthumously, An Unexpected Life: A Memoir offers a final account of Gloria Steinem’s political formation, personal choices and decades of feminist organising. It provides a way to move beyond the familiar photographs and return to the voice, experiences and contradictions behind the icon.

An Unexpected Life: A Memoir
by Gloria Steinem
View the book on Amazon

Affiliate disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The price paid by the reader remains unchanged.

Related articles

• Feminism in Art Isn’t a Style: It’s a Battle Over Visibility
• Womanhouse: Feminist Art, Domestic Space and Power
• Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party: The Feminist Artwork That Forced Museums to Change
• Kara Walker: Silhouettes, Race and the Violence of Memory
• Feminist Art: When “Women’s Work” Becomes a Weapon Against the Art Hierarchy
• Feminist Art in the United States: From Womanhouse to Political Visibility
• The Story of the Guerrilla Girls: Interview with an Original Member
• Mira Schor: Feminist Painting, Language and the Politics of Modesty
• Christina Schlesinger: Freedom Was the Real Revolution