Gloria Steinem, a trailblazing journalist and activist who devoted her life to fighting for women’s rights, died on Wednesday. She was 92. Her passing was announced in a statement posted on her Instagram, which did not specify the cause of death. “Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” the post read.

A Legacy of Activism and Journalism

Starting in the 1960s, at a time when women were largely limited to domestic roles, Steinem challenged gender stereotypes and championed feminist ideals like equality, sisterhood and reproductive freedom. In doing so, she inspired generations of women to do the same. Today, she’s a household name that is synonymous with the women’s rights movement.

“Because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve,” then-President Barack Obama said when he awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her commitment to activism in 2013. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”

Early Life and Influences

Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. She graduated from Smith College in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in government studies. After Steinem finished school, she spent two years in India on a fellowship, where she traveled with people organizing against caste violence and wrote for Indian publications — an experience that she said shaped her activism in the U.S.

When Steinem returned home, she was briefly involved with a CIA-backed organization that sent American students to Soviet-sponsored youth festivals in order to promote pro-American principles. This would become a point of contention for some feminists later in Steinem’s career.

Journalistic Contributions and Founding of Ms. Magazine

Steinem first gained notice as a journalist when she went undercover as a Playboy bunny in 1963 to write an expose on the working conditions within Hugh Hefner’s Playboy clubs. She later stated that she worried the article damaged her career, causing editors to see her as a Playboy bunny first and a writer second. She had already been described as “this year’s pretty girl,” who “pretends to be a writer” by renowned writers Gay Talese and Saul Bellow.

But after covering a group of women who had begun to discuss the indignity and physical danger they encountered while seeking abortions, feminism became a larger part of Steinem’s life, ultimately causing her to decide the article had been worth it.

Steinem founded Ms. magazine in 1971, a original magazine written for women by women which tackled abortion and other issues such as sexism, equal pay, and domestic violence — a far cry from the diet of beauty, cookery, and supporting-your-husband topics that were the staple of magazines aimed at women. One of its early features listed prominent women who publicly declared that they had received abortions, including Steinem herself.

Steinem also helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, a national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education; the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that works to advance numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at the national and state level; and the Women’s Media Center.

“If you’ve suffered discrimination, you’re sensitive to it on every level. I learned feminism largely from Black women. Women of color basically invented feminism,” she told the New Yorker.