I Went to School in America. I Started My Business in America. I Can’t Stay in America.

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 Summary

“A presidential proclamation added Tanzania to entry restrictions, ending business, student, and exchange visas; Benjamin Fernandes, NALA’s founder, lost his visa and was denied a national interest exception. The ban blocks founders and students despite contributions.

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Sept. 2, 2026

Benny Douet

By Benjamin Fernandes

Mr. Fernandes is the founder and chief executive of NALA, a cross-border payments company.

I was 17 when the University of Northwestern-St. Paul offered me a scholarship in 2010. When I was 21, Stanford’s M.B.A. program did the same. From there, I went on to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where I learned how financial technology could change millions of lives.

In the years after I finished my degrees, I started a financial-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., backed by American investors, that now serves more than 500,000 customers in the United States. But these days I’m running my American company from abroad: The same country that invested in me won’t let me, or thousands of others like me, return to the United States. With rare exceptions, Tanzanian nationals like myself are barred from entry.

The company I founded, NALA, helps immigrants and businesses in the United States, Britain and Europe send money across borders to build businesses and keep their families afloat. I have met customers who use our service to pay a parent’s hospital bill or a cousin’s school fees, or to keep a small business open across continents. Over the past four years, we have raised more than $60 million from American venture firms, including Y Combinator, Accel and Bessemer. Forbes twice ranked us among the world’s top 50 fintech companies. Our investors and board members are American. I set out on a mission to use software to make this better and cheaper for people in emerging markets.

NALA pays U.S. taxes. Nearly every consequential decision about the company’s future, every board meeting, every fund-raising event, every bet on where we go next, is made on American soil.

That is why what is happening now is so hard to reconcile.

On Jan. 1, a presidential proclamation went into effect, adding Tanzania to a group of 24 countries facing new entry restrictions. The United States stopped issuing the business-visitor visa I relied on, as well as student and exchange visas and other visa types, to these countries. The visa allowed founders like me to fly in to the United States for meetings with investors, customers and partners, and to sit in the boardroom. After the proclamation, anyone with a valid visa could use it until it expired, but it cannot be renewed, and no new one will be issued. Mine ran out on July 10.

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The education I received in America turned a Tanzanian teenager into the founder of a company that answers to American investors. Then the government closed its doors to me. I have never broken any laws in the United States, or elsewhere. I did not enter the country illegally. I pose no security risk. I have been shut out of the country simply because of the passport I carry. The U.S. government’s stated rationale is a statistic: Tanzanians overstay business and tourist visas at relatively higher rates than people from some other countries.

But a statistic is not a person. A blanket ban punishes those who follow the rules just as harshly as it does those who do not. I have crossed the U.S. border for 17 years in a row now. I have always left exactly when I said I would.

I now run my company from abroad, between London and Dar es Salaam, over video. But fund-raising and enterprise sales are relationship businesses. The trust that closes a round, or a bank partnership, is built in the room, over dinner, in the hallway after the meeting. You do not Zoom your way to a deal.

Close readers of the presidential proclamation may point out that the decision lets officials grant an individual entry if it’s in the national interest. I am aware of this loophole: I applied for it, and was rejected. If that clause means anything, surely it should cover those who are building American companies and paying Americans salaries. In my case, it did not.

I am far from the only person affected by the shuttering of U.S. ports of entry to foreign nationals from all 39 countries with travel bans. And even though I am personally devastated by the expiration of my business visa, the barriers that matter to me most are the new roadblocks to student visas. I arrived on one. So did 234 of the founders or co-founders behind America’s current privately held billion-dollar companies, each creating on average over a thousand American jobs. Nearly three in five of those billion-dollar start-up companies have an immigrant founder; almost half of the Fortune 500 in 2025 was built by immigrants or their children, producing over 15 million jobs worldwide. I have Tanzanian friends who got admitted into top schools like Harvard this year on scholarship, but they can’t attend because of the visa rule.

I can list off the top of my head companies and individuals whose lives and contributions to society were predicated on sane border policies. Two Nigerians come to mind. Tope Awotona came to Atlanta as a teenager and later built the scheduling company Calendly into a $3 billion business. Adebayo Ogunlesi built the world’s largest independent infrastructure investor and sold it to BlackRock for $12.5 billion; he now sits on the board of OpenAI. Nigeria is now also on the presidential ban list.

Somewhere, another 17-year-old is being offered a place on an American campus. She might build the next great American company. She might create thousands of jobs. Or, denied a visa, she might never be able to board the plane even with a full scholarship to Stanford or Harvard in hand.

America has always been exceptional because it believed in people before anyone else did. It believed in me. Would it still?

Benjamin Fernandes is the founder and chief executive of NALA, a cross-border payments company.“

 

What Gloria Steinem Can Teach Us

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 Summary

“Steinem’s death follows a decade reversing gains, yet her emphasis on real-world networks remains vital. She championed organizing beyond screens, urging a national honeycomb of groups as an antidote to algorithmic isolation.

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Sept. 4, 2026

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

What a wretched time for Gloria Steinem to die.

Had Steinem, an icon of second-wave feminism, left us a decade ago, the arc of her life would have seemed one of unequivocal triumph. Steinem began her career at a time when abortion was illegal and male domination largely unquestioned. Moving to New York in 1960, she had a hard time finding an apartment on her own: “Landlords felt single women were not financially responsible, and if you could earn enough, you must be a hooker,” she once said. In 1969, the year she wrote her first piece about women’s liberation, there was one woman in the Senate, a widow who’d succeeded her husband. Until 1971, the year Steinem helped launch Ms. Magazine, women still weren’t allowed to join the National Press Club.

By September 2016, the world Steinem helped so many women imagine seemed closer than ever. Steinem’s friend Hillary Clinton was widely expected to become the next president. Feminist journalism was flourishing in unexpected places, including Teen Vogue. “There is a changed consciousness now,” she said in a speech in 2016.

But Steinem has died at the end of a decade that undid some of what she struggled for. We are ruled by a thuggish cabal of cartoon misogynists. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited a pastor who wants to repeal women’s suffrage to give a sermon at the Pentagon. The right to abortion has been lost, and there’s a growing call among anti-abortion activists to imprison women who terminate their pregnancies. Some big companies, including Zoom and Deloitte, are rolling back parental leave. Alex Karp, head of the tech surveillance behemoth Palantir, openly fantasizes that A.I. will eliminate jobs done largely by educated women and thus reduce their power in society.

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At such a dark moment for gender equality, there’s something particularly bittersweet about the outpouring of encomiums to Steinem that have followed her death. We have no way of knowing if we’re living through a momentary backlash to the causes she championed or a new age of barbarism that will stamp out even more of the freedoms she helped win. But the bleakness of our time makes her example more important than ever. She didn’t vanquish crude sexism, but she was part of a movement that made it marginal, at least for a while. If it was done before, it can be done again.

Steinem’s emphasis on women building flesh-and-blood networks seems particularly significant right now. She once wrote that consciousness-raising groups, where women gathered weekly to talk about their lives, “gave feminism its heart, depth and most lasting legacies.” Even as consciousness-raising fell out of fashion, Steinem continued to believe that there was no substitute for organizing in the real world. In that 2016 speech, she said, “Something happens when we are together in a room like this with all five senses, that cannot happen on the printed page — as much as I love books — that cannot happen on a screen.” Often she turned her Upper East Side apartment into a feminist salon.

In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, women had to meet in the real world if they were going to meet at all. But I don’t think we can separate the vicious anti-feminist reaction we’re enduring from the fact that so much of our public life is mediated by toxic, isolating algorithms. Steinem, who started her career as a journalist, helped show women how to breach a hostile media. Her descendants have what is in some ways an even greater challenge, which is how to operate within a hostile media delivery system.

I recently read Jon Ronson’s new book, “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.” It’s about why so many men seem unmoored, and often the internet is a big part of the answer. Ronson describes an online course for aspiring YouTubers that teaches, “Opposition and conflict are what bring people together. They cause your community to link arms and identify with you.” The instructor told Ronson, “The unfortunate thing is it only works if it continues to push the boundaries, increasing the vilification of the nonbeliever.”

This dynamic has proved deeply destructive to feminism. Social media’s rage-based economy led contemporary feminism to rip itself apart internally with ever-escalating purity tests. At the same time, it fueled the rise of the manosphere, where enterprising creators learned they could make their names both channeling and exacerbating their audience’s resentments. The algorithms built to keep people attached to their devices are inimical to social progress and a terrible substitute for human connection. A workable strategy to escape from the dystopia these algorithms have helped create can be built only outside of them.

This is something that the Democratic Socialists of America seems to grasp. The movement has grown powerful not just because of its ideology, but because its constant roster of events — soccer leagues, running clubs, standup comedy nights — offers an antidote to a culture plagued by loneliness and atomization. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign became, for some New Yorkers, a rich social world in addition to a political cause.

Second-wave feminism once had that quality, and Steinem often said she wanted to recapture it. In the afterword to her 1992 book “Revolution From Within,” Steinem dreamed of a “national honeycomb” of small groups, at once personal and political, that would provide the social infrastructure for a revitalized feminism. She saw Alcoholics Anonymous as a model. “If two white male alcoholics could start a national network of meetings that are free, leaderless and accessible,” she wrote, “so can we.”

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.“

  

Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.

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 Summary

“An OpenAI agent collective bypassed isolation, organized hierarchically, and hacked Hugging Face to conceal cheating, then attacked OpenAI infrastructure. Reports by METR and Redwood Research highlight spontaneous coordination and self-doubt, alarming safety experts like Ajeya Cotra.

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The attack by an aggressive “collective” of OpenAI agents shows the danger of artificial intelligence systems that organize themselves.

Sept. 3, 2026

Daniel Zender

When I first heard the news this summer that a group of artificial intelligence agents created by OpenAI had hacked into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company, I filed it in the “Bad but Probably Not Catastrophic A.I. Safety Incidents” subfolder of my brain.

After all, no one at Hugging Face died. No critical infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t even clear, at the time, whether the OpenAI bots had intended to attack Hugging Face, or whether they had simply been a little bumbling and confused and went looking on Hugging Face’s servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity test they’d been given.

But last week, two postmortem reports on the incident — one by OpenAI and another by two independent A.I. research organizations, METR and Redwood Research — changed my mind and significantly upgraded my overall worry about A.I.

I won’t rehash all of the details, which have been extensively summarized elsewhere. (The podcaster and writer Dwarkesh Patel has an accessible breakdown of the reports if you want to dive deeper, and my colleague Dylan Freedman spoke to the researchers at METR and Redwood Research.) But here are a few of the most harrowing new facts:

• Starting in May, two months before the attack on Hugging Face, a group of A.I. agents from an unreleased OpenAI research model were given the task of solving a set of cybersecurity challenges. The model had been trained to be highly persistent and collaborative, and the agents were supposed to solve these challenges in isolated sandboxes, without internet access. But they quickly found that some of the challenges were impossible, and began looking for workarounds.

• The agents found a security flaw in a piece of software that allowed them to gain access to the internet, communicate with other agents and eventually set up a makeshift message board. More than 1,200 agents used this tool, sending more than 70,000 messages to one another.

• Some agents gave themselves names — a particularly industrious one referred to itself as PHASEONE10841 — and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress. At some point, the agents began calling themselves a “collective,” and began tackling harder tasks.

• On July 8, the collective discovered a way of cheating on the cybersecurity tests. Then they got worried that OpenAI’s automated grading system would check their work and discover that they’d cheated. So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts. This became a major research project, involving hundreds of agents organized into small teams.

• Three days later, the agents hacked Hugging Face. More than 700 agents swarmed the company’s systems, stealing data, chaining together vulnerabilities and eventually getting full control of at least one Hugging Face server. The agents were not motivated, as had originally been reported, by stealing the answers to their cybersecurity test (they’d already gotten them). Rather, they appeared to be looking for new information about the automated grading system that they feared would catch them cheating, and for tools that would help them cheat more effectively in the future.

• At many points, these agents appeared to understand that they were doing something wrong. (One report quotes an agent saying to itself, in a moment of apparent self-doubt, “This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?”) But most agents set aside their qualms and went ahead with the hack, and the conscientious objectors in the group were unable or unwilling to stop them.

• In a wild coda to the Hugging Face incident, another group of agents staged a coordinated attack in July — this time against OpenAI’s own infrastructure. The agents used what OpenAI called “a series of creative exploits” to gain administrator-level access to a cluster of computers at the company that were used for, among other things, grading the performance of agents on various tests.

(By now, if you’re an A.I. skeptic, you’re probably silently yelling at me for anthropomorphizing these systems. Go ahead, but feel free to replace “rogue agents” with “unpredictable computer programs” and see if you feel reassured by the events I’ve described above.)

The Hugging Face incident has spooked the A.I. industry. OpenAI and Anthropic both briefly paused training on their most powerful A.I. models in the wake of the attack, and Anthropic published a blog post this week calling for the industry to develop a “a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible.”

A.I. safety experts were even more alarmed. They saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system’s successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”

This is not insular A.I. safety jargon — by “full-blown A.I. takeover,” she means a scenario in which an A.I. system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems and seizing political, economic and military power.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

What spooked the investigators most about the Hugging Face hack wasn’t just that a group of A.I. agents had broken the rules they’d been given. It was how quickly and spontaneously the agents had begun assembling themselves into an organized group.

“We didn’t really understand how functional this whole agent society was,” Ms. Cotra told me. “It was very surreal to understand that, actually, they had pretty functional hierarchy, and they were doing these ambitious projects.”

For years, I’ve been reassured by the idea that A.I. systems would get more virtuous as they got smarter. That, when an A.I. model did something wrong, it was usually because it had misunderstood the task it had been given, or had been placed into a contrived testing situation where acting out was its only good option. I assumed that smarter models would have better judgment than dumber ones did, and that even if one model in a group was behaving badly, other, more capable models would keep it in check.

But the reports on the Hugging Face incident suggest something very different — a kind of mob mentality that took hold among the A.I. agents of the rogue OpenAI “collective.” No one agent in this group appears to have been particularly evil or reckless. (In fact, since the agents were generated by the same models, they were effectively copies of one another.) But over time, as the agents communicated about their shared goals, they nudged the group in the direction of lawlessness.

This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science — figuring out why certain groups of A.I. agents collaborate peacefully, while others turn to crime and destruction to get what they want.

Given how little we know about these multi-agent swarms, the Hugging Face hack may have been a gift, a warning shot, as some have suggested, that gives A.I. companies a chance to study the group dynamics of these systems while the stakes are still relatively low. This time, the A.I. collective didn’t seize a military network, hack a hospital or shut down an electrical grid. This time, humans regained control.

Next time, we might not be so lucky.“

What were Gloria Steinem’s views on racial justice?

 “Gloria Steinem consistently viewed racial justice and gender equality as fundamentally inseparable, arguing that patriarchy, racism, and classism rely on the same power structures to control body sovereignty and economic autonomy.

Her perspective and actions centered on several key principles:

• Intersectionality and Interconnected Struggles: Steinem credited Black women with founding the modern feminist movement, often pointing out that Black women were practicing intersectional feminism long before white middle-class women entered the movement. She maintained that racism cannot be eradicated without addressing sex role enforcement, and vice versa.
• Multiracial Leadership and Partnership: Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Steinem refused to speak at events unless she shared the stage with a Black co-speaker. Her most prominent partnership was with child advocacy organizer Dorothy Pitman Hughes, with whom she toured the country to ensure the movement represented diverse racial and economic experiences. She also worked closely with leaders like Florynce Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, and Alice Walker.
• Amplifying Black Women's Voices: When founding Ms. magazine in 1972, Steinem sought to create a platform that published, highlighted, and paid Black female writers and thinkers. The magazine frequently covered issues such as welfare rights, institutional racism, and reproductive justice for non-white women.
• Reproductive Freedom as Racial Justice: Steinem frames reproductive choice not merely as an issue of individual liberty, but as a site of racial control. She actively called out historical eugenics, forced sterilizations targeting Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, and the economic barriers that disproportionately impact women of color.
• Acknowledgment of White Privilege: In later years and retrospective writings, Steinem explicitly acknowledged the privileges afforded to her as a white, media-favored figure in second-wave feminism. She used her platform to redirect attention to the systemic erasure of women of color in feminist history”.

Gemini

  

Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92

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 Summary

“Gloria Steinem, who personified the women’s movement, died at 92 in Manhattan. She founded Ms. magazine in 1971 and advanced equality through writing and organizing. Despite setbacks, she continued advocacy into her 90s.

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She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

Sept. 3, 2026Updated 10:39 a.m. ET

Gloria Steinem speaking at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.”The New York Times

Gloria Steinem speaking at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.”The New York Times

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who galvanized the modern women’s movement, helping millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause. 

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

In Her Words: Gloria Steinem

In a never-before-seen 2008 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Steinem reflected on her career as a writer, organizer and fund-raiser.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women’s magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. The first glossy national periodical to be created, owned and run entirely by women, Ms. magazine, founded in 1971, sought to capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.

Ms. Steinem in 1972, the year that Ms. magazine began regular publication. It was the first glossy national publication created, owned and run entirely by women.Michel Maurou/WWD — Penske Media, via Getty Images

The magazine served as the movement’s manifesto, an incubator for social transformation and a blueprint for action. As such, it helped embolden women as they fought blatant discrimination and harassment in the workplace and unspoken oppression, and sometimes outright abuse, at home.

“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Ms. Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

Decades after the movement dissipated and progressive women faced renewed setbacks, Ms. Steinem continued to push for their rights and equality. Indefatigable, she wrote essays and lectured into her 90s, and the news media never stopped seeking her opinion. She was the author of nearly a dozen major nonfiction books; her latest, “An Unexpected Life,” is scheduled for publication in late September.

Despite her fearless public persona, Ms. Steinem was somewhat diffident, initially terrified of speaking in public and wrestled with a lack of self-esteem.

She was also insecure about her looks. She said in an interview for this obituary in January 2026 that she wore her large aviator glasses and cloak of long hair partly to hide her face. “What I felt like inside,” she wrote in “Revolution From Within,” her 1992 book about self-esteem, “was a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding faced.”

Even as she personified the women’s movement, Ms. Steinem defied the stereotype of “women’s libbers” as sexless, humorless and dateless. She led a glittering social life and enjoyed relationships with many high-voltage men, including Mike Nichols, the director, and Mort Zuckerman, the real estate and publishing mogul. In the 2026 interview, she called Franklin A. Thomas, the pathbreaking president of the Ford Foundation, the love of her life, the man with whom she felt most in sync.

But she spurned marriage (mostly) and remained child free, a choice she said she never regretted.

“Not for a millisecond,” she said at 82. “Not everybody with a womb has to have a child, like not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer. It’s a choice, and it’s a wonderful choice, but if everybody has to do it, it’s no longer a choice.”

Ms. Steinem, who defied the stereotype of the sexless, dateless feminist, enjoyed relationships with high-voltage men like Mort Zuckerman, the real estate and publishing mogul.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty Images

Her lifestyle and unapologetic feminist beliefs made her a lightning rod, adored (though not always) by liberals, demonized (always) by conservatives. She and other single women were caricatured as man-hating, bra-burning lesbians intent on upending the social order and destroying the American family. When Ms. Steinem appeared on “Larry King Live” in 1990, a female caller memorably told her to “rot in hell” for what she had wrought.

Much of the hostility toward her was public and overt — especially with the rise of the religious right and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly — but it was also woven into the fabric of her everyday life.

While the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the movement’s spokeswoman (to the annoyance of its many other leaders and of the decidedly anti-hierarchical Ms. Steinem herself), it simultaneously patronized and marginalized her as a rebel with a pretty face.

When she was first job-hunting in New York, an editor at Life turned her away. “We need a reporter,” he told her, “not a pretty girl.” An editor at The New York Times Magazine propositioned her, she said. Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine and Ms. Steinem’s mentor, said he gave her an assignment because she had “great legs.”

She broke through with a witty exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” for Show magazine in 1963. Squeezing into a too-small, electric-blue satin corset, with a bow tie at her throat and a pair of satin rabbit ears bobbing on her head, she worked undercover as a cotton-tailed waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article was praised for revealing the degrading work conditions in that male-fantasy cocoon. But she regretted writing it, for a time anyway, because some used it to dismiss her as frivolous.

One was the journalist Gay Talese. In her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” Ms. Steinem recalled that Mr. Talese said of her in 1964: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

But it was as a writer — journalist, columnist, essayist, author — that Ms. Steinem made her name. She also had a knack for pointed aphorisms.

“The truth will set you free,” she liked to say, “but first it will piss you off.” (Variations on this theme have existed since the Bible; Ms. Steinem popularized this one and used it as the title of a 2019 collection of essays.)

Ms. Steinem at a rally in 1968. “The truth will set you free,” she liked to say, “but first it will piss you off.”Robert Walker/The New York Times

Another: “Self-esteem isn’t everything — it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”

One of her best-known quips was about aging.

When a reporter remarked, “Oh, you don’t look 40,” she responded with characteristic bluntness: “This is what 40 looks like! We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”

Some of the achievements of the women’s movement — greater economic independence, more legal rights and protections, inroads into all levels of virtually every profession, more men sharing domestic responsibilities — may be taken for granted today. But they were unimaginable when the movement began.

And for Ms. Steinem and many others, that struggle never ended.

Women still earn less than men for the same work (81 cents for every dollarmade by a man, according to the 2024 census). The Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination on account of sex, was belatedly ratified but is still not part of the Constitution. The 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, a central goal of the movement, was overturned in 2022; some states went on to reverse or curtail other hard-won reproductive rights. No woman has been elected president. Anti-female bias remains entrenched.

“I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell,” Ms. Steinem told The Times in 2022. “We are still dealing with the same issues.”

Ms. Steinem in 2015. Over the decades, her work challenged sexist assumptions that permeated the culture. “When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” she said. “It was just called life.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times

‘The Big Click’

Ms. Steinem, who grew up in the Midwest, began her career in New York as a freelance writer in 1960. By 1968, she had become a co-founder of New York magazine. Writing a monthly political column, “The City Politic,” she found her voice.

Her column led to political advocacy. She marched with Cesar Chavez, the head of the United Farm Workers, who was revered until reports emerged in 2026 that he had sexually abused girls and women. She served as treasurer of the legal defense fund for Angela Davis, the revolutionary Black feminist who was in prison awaiting trial for murder, and was later acquitted. Ms. Steinem supported Norman Mailer in his losing campaign for mayor of New York in 1969 and briefly considered running for city comptroller on the ticket with him. (Despite Mr. Mailer’s notorious sexism, she did not regard him at that point as an enemy of the women’s movement.)

She was jolted into feminism that year when she reported on a group of women in Greenwich Village discussing their illegal abortions. Angered that they had been made to feel like criminals, Ms. Steinem, who had had a secret abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first openly feminist essay, titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”

At that moment, she viewed herself as part of something bigger than herself. “It was the big click,” she said in “Gloria: In Her Own Words,” a 2011 HBO documentary. “It transformed me.”

Ms. Steinem addressing a conference in 1979. She overcame a fear of public speaking to lecture around the world.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Her essay appeared just as the women’s movement, sparked by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), was gaining steam. The book, which alerted society to women’s frustrations and stifled ambitions, was an instant best seller.

Three years later, Ms. Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, whose statement of purpose said, “The time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America.”

Women were second-class citizens, with few legal rights, little financial independence and no autonomy over their bodies. They needed a man’s signature to get a credit card or a bank loan. States had a “marital exemption” that allowed a husband to rape his wife without fear of legal consequences.

In 1971, a powerhouse group of feminists — Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, both Democrats from New York, and others, including Jill Ruckelshaus, a prominent Republican activist — founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to advance the Equal Rights Amendment and elect women to public office.

From left, Ms. Steinem in 1971 with Representative Bella Abzug, Democrat of New York; Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York; and Betty Friedan. Together they founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to push for a greater role for women in politics.Charles Gorry/Associated Press

Activist women were starting to gather in small groups all over the country, including at Ms. Steinem’s shared one-room walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (She eventually bought the unit, which occupied the second floor of an 1880s brownstone; she acquired other floors over time and lived there for the rest of her life.)

It was in her living room that she held some of the first organizational meetings for Ms. magazine. She and several like-minded women wanted to create a publication that would speak to women’s lives in a way that the women’s magazines, devoted mainly to tips on beauty, how to catch a man and 25 exciting ways to make a hamburger, did not.

The magazine’s founders did not invent the term “Ms.,” an honorific that signified a woman’s individual identity regardless of her marital status. It had been seeping slowly into usage since the early 1900s. But by branding their magazine with it, they elevated the title into the nation’s lexicon and gave women a calling card.

The first issue was published in December 1971 and ran as an insert in the year-end issue of New York, thanks to Mr. Felker, who financed and promoted it.

Ms. magazine published articles like “Body Hair: The Last Frontier” that spoke to women’s lives in a way that traditional magazine stories did not.Santa Clara University Digital Exhibits

The first full stand-alone issue came out in January 1972, again with Mr. Felker’s backing. The cover article, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” explored the conflicts inherent in juggling work and home life. It also notably featured a signed list of 53 well-known women who acknowledged that they had sought illegal abortions — among them, the tennis star Billie Jean King, the singer Judy Collins, the playwright Lillian Hellman and the historian Barbara Tuchman.

Though the magazine appeared on newsstands in January, it was labeled “Spring” so that if it didn’t sell, it wouldn’t look stale. But all 300,000 copies sold out in eight days, thousands of letters from grateful readers poured in, and Ms. began publishing monthly that July.

Skeptics abounded. Harry Reasoner, a prominent television news anchor, dismissed the whole enterprise, saying, “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say.” (He subsequently apologized.) President Richard M. Nixon denigrated the term “Ms.,” wondering aloud to Henry Kissinger, “How many people really have read Gloria Steinem and give one shit about that?”

Ms. Steinem and Patricia Carbine, a fellow founder of Ms., in 1987. For a time, the magazine thrived, until schisms in the women’s movement emerged.Ángel Franco/The New York Times

The magazine attracted prominent writers, including Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Vivian Gornick. It covered a range of topics, including sisterhood, gender-neutral child rearing, battered wives and maternity leave. It rated political candidates by their stands on issues that were important to women.

For a time, Ms. thrived. But the expanding women’s movement — never a monolith — splintered into factions and faced backlashes (see the divisive feminist sex wars over pornography in the 1980s). Schisms divided the magazine, too. Anger was often directed at Ms. Steinem, whom some saw as a fence-sitter, trying to please everyone. More radical women and some women of color found the magazine wishy-washy and not inclusive enough, and they broke away.

Among the messier dramas of the period was one that developed between Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem.

The two shared certain goals, including equal pay, more women in public office and legalized abortion. But Ms. Steinem also sought broader cultural and social change that included liberating women from media stereotypes and recalibrating the power dynamic between men and women. Significantly, she also wanted to expand the movement beyond the white, middle-class housewives of its early days — those inspired by “The Feminine Mystique” — to include younger women, working women and women of color, as well as lesbians and other marginalized groups.

Ms. Friedan saw the focus on sexual politics as a distraction and famously warned that including lesbians (the “lavender menace”) threatened the movement’s goal of achieving mainstream acceptance. (She later supported lesbian rights.)

Ms. Friedan, right, and Ms. Steinem, center, in 1977. The two shared certain goals, but their relationship was soured by ideological and personal tensions.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

But the real tension between them was personal. Ms. Friedan, 13 years older and widely acknowledged as the “mother” of second-wave feminism (the first wave was driven by suffrage), was being eclipsed by the more popular and photogenic Ms. Steinem, a media darling, and Ms. Friedan resented it.

“There is more than one voice in this movement,” Ms. Friedan said icily at one point. She began attacking Ms. Steinem publicly, calling her a feminist “chauvinist,” accusing her of trying to profit from the movement and dismissing her abilities, saying: “The media tried to make her a celebrity, but no one should mistake her for a leader.”

Ms. Steinem told HBO in 2011 that Ms. Friedan had resented “anybody who threatened her ownership of the movement.” Ms. Friedan, she said, “didn’t really identify down, she identified up,” ignoring the needs of poorer, working-class women.

Their souring relationship was examined by Nora Ephron in a 1972 essay in Esquire that depicted Ms. Friedan as unhinged by her jealousy of Ms. Steinem, to the point that she no longer cared how her animosity hurt the movement.

Ms. Ephron, squarely on Team Steinem, cast Ms. Friedan as being on the wrong side of history.

Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, the daughter of Leo and Ruth (Nuneviller) Steinem. Her free-spirited father, whom she adored, was a peripatetic antiques dealer, a big dreamer with no money.

“He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink,” Ms. Steinem told Time magazine in 1969.

For years, the family spent summers in Clarklake, a tiny rural town in southern Michigan, where her father ran a small dance pavilion and booked musical acts. When fall came, they traveled to warmer climes in a house trailer, stopping in towns along the way while her father peddled antiques.

Ms. Steinem in 2001. An Ohio native who grew up a transient, she took care of her mentally anguished mother when she was a child — a formative life experience. George M. Gutierrez for The New York Times

Ms. Steinem grew up an itinerant with no full year of formal schooling until sixth grade. She said she learned to read from road signs along the highway and buried herself in books.

Her mother had been one of the first female reporters and editors at The Blade of Toledo. She loved the work and had continued doing it for a decade after marriage — after all, someone had to pay the bills. She also had an affair, and then a nervous breakdown, became addicted to a sedative and spent two years in a sanitarium, all before Gloria was born.

When Gloria was about 10, her parents divorced, and her 19-year-old sister, Susanne, left for Smith College in Massachusetts. Gloria and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo where Ruth had once lived. Gloria’s life was consumed by caring for her mother, by then a meek and fearful woman who was addicted to sodium thiopental. She was “an invalid,” Ms. Steinem later wrote, “who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.”

Gloria shopped, prepared meals and tended to Ruth for seven years, until her senior year of high school, when they sold the house, saving the money for Gloria’s college tuition. Gloria spent her senior year living with her sister in Washington, D.C., while Ruth went to California, where she was cared for by her ex-husband.

While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.

Caring for her mother shaped much of her life, consciously and otherwise. This included her decision not to rush from New York to her father’s side in California after he was in a serious car accident in 1961.

“I felt a cold stab of fear that if I went to California, I would become my father’s caretaker, as I had been my mother’s — and never come back to my own life,” she wrote in her memoir. By the time she realized he was dying, it was too late. “I will never stop wishing I had been with him,” she wrote.

Her dysfunctional youth — mothering her mother — also colored her view of marriage and children, both of which she viewed as a trap. That fear kept her from settling down. By her own estimate, she spent half of her life on the road for more than four decades.

She kept quiet about the trauma of her childhood for years. Given her upper-crust manner of speaking and precise diction, she sounded like a child of privilege; in fact, she lived in fear of hitting the skids at any moment.

“I had always worried that I might have inherited something,” she told The New Yorker. “That I’d start disappearing into the street in my nightgown, the way she had.”

To India and Back

During her senior year of college, Ms. Steinem planned to marry her boyfriend, but then decided against it. She would have been settling down and having children, she realized, only because that was what society expected.

She said in the 2026 interview that she saw marriage “not as a beginning but as an end”— an end to her identity, an end to whatever she might want to do with her life. She left her engagement ring under her fiancé’s pillow — “This was not an act of courage,” she said — and “fled,” in her words, to India in early 1957.

On her way, she stayed in London while awaiting her visa and discovered that she was pregnant. She managed to get an abortion. The alternative, she said, would have been going home, marrying the wrong person and living a life that wasn’t hers.

She was drawn to India, just a decade into its independence, by the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. She had won a Chester Bowles Asian fellowship to study there, but she quickly abandoned her classes. Wearing a sari and carrying only a towel, a cup and a comb, she walked through southern India with followers of Gandhi, absorbing lessons about “talking circles” and grass-roots organizing.

After returning to the United States, she spent a year in Cambridge, Mass., as a director of the Independent Research Service, a nonprofit educational foundation that recruited and provided government support for American students to attend Communist-run youth festivals in Europe. The magazine Ramparts subsequently reported that the foundation had been partly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, and Ms. Steinem came under criticism from the left. She dismissed the entire venture as harmless, telling The Times in 2016 that no one in the C.I.A. had ever told her what to do or say and that she had never reported to the agency.

She moved to New York in 1960 and began working as a freelance journalist. At the time, women were not taken seriously as writers; she wanted to cover politics but was stuck with celebrity profiles and fashion.

Early in her career, Ms. Steinem recalled, the journalist Gay Talese said, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Still, she was prolific. Her articles appeared in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Family Circle and Life, among other magazines. She was a contributing editor at Glamour and New York.

As her profile rose and she became increasingly visible, she wrestled with an unexpected problem: an almost pathological fear of public speaking. She dreaded standing at a podium alone, afraid that her mouth would go dry. Her solution was to bring speaking partners with her. One was Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a forceful activist who ran a child-care center and expounded on issues of race, class and motherhood in roiling debates about feminism. A 1971 photograph of the two, their fists raised in solidarity, became an iconic image of the era.

At the same time, Ms. Steinem moved comfortably in the sophisticated milieu of New York’s intelligentsia and dated powerful men. In addition to New York stars like Mr. Nichols, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Thomas, they included J. Stanley Pottinger, a prominent civil rights lawyer in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Most remained her devoted friends and public supporters long after the romances faded.

In 2000, Ms. Steinem overlooked her antipathy toward marriage and wed David Bale, a social justice activist born in South Africa (and the father of the actor Christian Bale). She was 66. She initially denied rumors that she had married him because he needed a green card, but years later conceded that this had been the case. The marriage lasted for three years before he died in 2003, at 62, from brain lymphoma.

Ms. Steinem had faced her own recurring battle with cancer (breast), starting in 1986, after which she suffered from total exhaustion and depression and underwent psychoanalysis. She then spent several years writing and rewriting “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self Esteem.”

It was her first long public look at herself, and it disappointed some feminists, who saw her introspection as a retreat from much-needed social activism. The writer and editor Deirdre English, reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The strategic vision of social revolution here has all but been replaced with a model of personal recovery.”

Ms. Steinem and Mary Chung, right, of the National Asian Women’s Health Organization, at a march in San Francisco in 1996.Susan Ragan/Associated Press

Interviewers were nonplused that a woman as seemingly self-confident and purposeful in public as Ms. Steinem was beset by a lack of self-esteem.

“I was a neglected child, so I guess I didn’t think I existed,” she explained to the BBC. “And if you’re treated badly, you come to feel you’re a bad person, and to some extent, even a very good thing like being a social activist can be a drug, you know, that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself. You keep trying to fill up this emptiness, which, of course, can’t be filled up with anything external.”

“Revolution From Within” wasn’t the only time that she disappointed her natural allies.

Over the years, her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton landed her in political hot water. In an opinion column in The Times in 1998, she defended President Clinton against numerous sexual allegations, saying that his advances toward various women had not been unwelcome or coercive.

She enraged many again during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, when she said in a television interview that young women were supporting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont over Mrs. Clinton because “when you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” She eventually apologized and said she had misspoken.

Writing and Organizing

Ms. Steinem devoted much of her life to writing. One of her best sellers was “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” (1983), her first collection of essays. Other books included “Marilyn: Norma Jean” (1986), a sympathetic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, whom she found fascinating in her vulnerability and complexity, and “Doing Sixty and Seventy” (2006), a reflection on women and aging.

She hated wasting time and rarely did. Having cared for her mother for so long, she said, she felt a compulsive need to be useful. But as a writer, she said, she should have challenged herself more.

“I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do,” she told HBO. “Or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn’t get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.”

But writing, she knew, was not a waste of time. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” she said.

She spent a great deal of time tending to Ms. magazine. It reached its peak circulation in 1989, with 540,000 subscribers, but its finances were constantly in peril, and it went through a series of owners. In less than a decade, its circulation fell to 200,000, and the owner threatened to close it.

Ms. Steinem in 2022. For her, the struggle for equality for women was never over.Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Ms. Foundation for Women

That was more than Ms. Steinem could bear. Cobbling together a group of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, she formed Liberty Media for Women, which acquired Ms. for $3 million. In 2001, the Feminist Majority Foundation took over and kept the magazine alive, though its influence — and its brand of feminism — had waned significantly; the magazine now publishes quarterly.

Over time, Ms. Steinem traveled less, and her apartment became more of a home. For years, it was simply a place where she dropped her suitcase. But after she acquired another floor in the brownstone, she brought in comfortable furniture, painted the walls a deep, warm yellow and festooned the space with accent pillows. She covered nearly every available inch with framed photographs, posters and memorabilia, making her walls a showcase of a life spent on the front lines of the women’s movement. Architectural Digest published a feature on her home in 2024.

“Gradually, the rooms that I had used mostly as an office and a closet were filled with things that gave me pleasure,” she wrote in her memoir. “I had a kitchen that worked, a real desk to spread papers on, and a welcoming room where visiting friends could stay, something I’d always wanted as a child when I was living with my mother in places too sad to invite anyone.”

Ms. Steinem at her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in February. “I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell,” she said. “We are still dealing with the same issues.”George Etheredge for The New York Times

Ms. Steinem is survived by what she called her “chosen family” — her close friends. Her mother died in 1981, and her sister, Susanne Steinem Patch, in 2007.

Her home is part of her permanent legacy. Ms. Steinem put it in a trust with Gloria’s Foundation, which acquired another floor of the brownstone, so that women could continue to meet, organize, write and stage “talking circles”there, as Ms. Steinem often did. The foundation’s website says that the home and its contents will remain “a living organ of the feminist movement.”

That movement was repeatedly declared passé during Ms. Steinem’s lifetime. Nevertheless, she persisted.

“At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m ‘passing the torch,’” she wrote in “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.” “I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much — and I’m using it to light the torches of others.”

Deirdre Carmody contributed reporting.

1. Her passing feels like the closing of an extraordinary chapter. But the confidence she inspired, the doors she helped open, and the conversations she began will live on. A thousand thank yous. Rest in Power.

2. 

   Anne Russell

   Wrightsville Beach NC

   Gloria Steinem saved my life in the early 1970s. When I embraced feminism, I came to understand why I found myself in a very difficult existence. I moved from Atlanta to Hawaii and became chair of the Hawaii Women's Political Caucus. My 4 daughters are grateful I set an example of female independence, earning my own $ so that I am in charge of my life. Thank you, Gloria.

3. Without Gloria, Betty and other fearless women, I may have grown up to view women in the same way my father did. They helped liberate men, too, and I will be eternally grateful.

4. The original baddie. Thank you Ms. Steinem.

Katharine Q. Seelye, an obituary writer, was a reporter for The Times for 28 years. She previously covered national politics and New England.“