NEW YORK — Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the lifelong activist whose pioneering work ran the gamut from women’s rights to magazine publishing to politics, has died. The Ohio native was 92.

The announcement was made on her Instagram, which said she died “peacefully at her home in New York City” on Wednesday, “surrounded by some of the many who loved her.”

The statement continued: “Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end.”

That fight, toward the end of her life, saw the rollback of abortion access with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022.

Steinem, awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2013, emerged from middle America as an outspoken and unapologetic champion of women’s rights in the male-dominated 1960s. Her national notoriety began with a 1963 expose of the Playboy Club, with Steinem donning a skimpy “bunny” outfit for a job in Hugh Hefner’s Manhattan men-only lair.

She turned the experience into a magazine story titled “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” summing up her first shift this way: “I served 22 customers, spilled two drinks … and got propositioned twice.”

By 1971, Steinem was among those launching the National Women’s Political Caucus, focused on introducing women’s issues into the American mainstream during the Nixon Administration. That same year, her Ms. magazine debuted as an insert in New York magazine before printing its first independent issue the next month.

Steinem was by then a national figure in the women’s movement, with her profile growing as she became a champion for reproductive rights, civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. She authored a half-dozen books, collected an assortment of honors, moved into television production and received the Freedom Award in 2019 from the National Civil Rights Museum.

“We need long-distance runners to make a real social revolution,” she once explained of a career that stretched across two centuries. “And you can’t be a long-distance runner unless you have some inner strength.”

Steinem, born in Toledo, Ohio, spent an unusual childhood traveling with her parents in a house trailer, bouncing between Michigan, Florida and California. The peripatetic lifestyle prevented her from attending school regularly until the age of 11, and she returned to Toledo to live with her mother when her parents divorced in 1946.

The young Steinem was left to take care of mom Ruth, who struggled with depression and mental health issues as the two lived together in a run-down home for the next six years.

She left Ohio for Smith College in Massachusetts, studying government, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1956, and never looking back. Steinem took a two-year fellowship where she traveled to India, writing for local publications and absorbing the activist principles of Mohandas Gandhi — lessons that guided her through the decades ahead.

“In the 1950s, once you married you became what your husband was, so it seemed like the last choice you’d ever have,” she once said in explaining her aversion to marriage and motherhood. Another of her oft-repeated lines, lifted from Australian educator Irina Dunn, offered a more concise version: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Steinem, after her return from India, launched a career as a freelance writer and scored with her two-part account of her creepy week in Hefner’s employ. She was soon weighing in on issues like abortion and women’s liberation, and in 1971 teamed with prominent feminists Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm in creating the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Abzug and Chisholm were both members of New York’s Congressional delegation.

The first issue of Ms. Magazine hit newsstands in 1971. The groundbreaking magazine became the first national publication to report on domestic violence with a 1978 cover story.

Steinem shrugged off criticism that her glamorous public persona was somehow at odds with her feminist work. A snarky 1971 piece in American Vogue magazine labeled her “the most attractive activist in Women’s Lib.”

But she defied such pigeonholing and did the work: Campus tours done with a Black feminist speaking partner, connecting with Native American activists and reaching out to lesbian feminists.

In 1983, her collection of essays titled “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” was released, with topics including “The Importance of Work” and “The Politics of Food.”

Three years later, as she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Steinem finished her biography of Marilyn Monroe — titled “Marilyn: Norma Jean.” Other published works included 1992′s “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem,” followed two years later by “Moving Beyond Words: Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money Muscles: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender.”

In 2015, her memoir “My Life on the Road” was published.

The famously single Steinem married environmental and animal rights activist David Bale, the father of actor Christian Bale, in 2000. He died of brain cancer three years later.

Steinem continued her work into her 90s, and her storied career led to three documentaries and a biography written by Carolyn Heilbrun.

Her fight, alongside other feminist leaders, for the passage of the Equal Right Amendment, was dramatized in 2020 with the Emmy-winning FX limited series “Mrs. America.” Rose Byrne portrayed Steinem.

“The idea of retiring is as foreign to me as the idea of hunting,” she once explained.

She worked until nearly the end of her life, hosting salons in her living room. According to the tribute on her social media, those “Talking Circles” will continue “long after she is no longer with us,” at Steinem’s insistence.

Her forthcoming autobiography, “An Unexpected Life,” is slated for publication later this month.

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