Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist who made feminism impossible to ignore - and did it while wearing a Playboy Bunny costume, no less - has died at the age of 92. Her Instagram announced her peaceful passing at her New York City home, surrounded by loved ones, noting that she 'continued working for equality until the very end.' Because of course she did. The woman who once said she hoped to live to 100 because 'there is so much to do' wasn't about to clock out early.

Born in Ohio in 1934, Steinem's origin story involved a trailer home, a mother with mental illness, and a childhood in a rundown Toledo house where she got an early education in how society treats working women. She graduated from a women's liberal arts college in 1956, then spent two years in India as a legal clerk at the supreme court. Upon returning to the US, she worked for the Independent Research Service - a CIA front that sent American students to disrupt Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals. Steinem later admitted she knew who was bankrolling the operation and, in a quote that would make conspiracy theorists swoon, said, 'If I had a choice I would do it again.'

Her journalism career began with a 1962 Esquire piece on contraception, but her true claim to fame came the next year when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for 11 days. The resulting exposé detailed the grim treatment of the glamour models, but not before Steinem lost 10 pounds - half in one night - and had her manager celebrate by making her costume two inches tighter. The article made her unemployable, because as we all know, once you've been a Bunny, that's your permanent identity, regardless of the reason.

In 1968, she joined New York magazine, where she coined the term 'reproductive freedom' while covering an abortion speakout. Having had an abortion herself at 22 in London, she described the moment as a 'big click' that launched her as an 'active feminist.' She later told the Observer, 'I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life.'

Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971 with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and the first issue featured Wonder Woman on the cover - because nothing says feminism like a superhero who had recently given up her powers for a man. Steinem argued for restoring them, and DC Comics eventually complied. She also wrote gems like 'If Men Could Menstruate' and 'After Black Power, Women's Liberation,' the latter making her a feminist leader despite her self-described terror of public speaking.

She credited Black feminists including Florynce Kennedy, Evelyn Cunningham, Shirley Chisholm, and Fannie Lou Hamer for teaching her activism, saying, 'It was like finding a family... women share hopes and a certain vision of the world, and a certain shit detector.'

Steinem was not without controversy. Some feminists grumbled that the media picked her for being young, white, and attractive - a charge she addressed in her 2015 book, My Life on the Road, calling it a 'biased and hurtful accusation.' She faced decades of criticism for a 1998 New York Times op-ed supporting Bill Clinton amid sexual harassment allegations, which she later walked back in 2017, saying, 'We have to believe women.' She also clarified her 1977 stance on transgender people, affirming in 2013 that their lives 'should be celebrated, not questioned.'

Her activism spanned a dizzying array of causes: domestic violence, female genital mutilation, the pornography industry, the Vietnam and Gulf wars, Black Lives Matter, Korean reunification, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and the Times Up movement. In 1984, she was arrested protesting apartheid outside the South African embassy in DC. She survived breast cancer (diagnosed 1986) and trigeminal neuralgia (1994), and in 2000 married environmental activist David Bale, becoming stepmother to actor Christian Bale.

Steinem was a vocal critic of Donald Trump, co-chairing the Women's March on Washington the day after his 2017 inauguration. She called the activism it sparked 'a thousand times more even than the Vietnam war.' In 2011, she told the Observer she hoped to live to 100. She made it to 92, which is still a solid run for someone who spent decades fighting the patriarchy and still found time to write nine books.