Hillary Clinton ‘heartsick’ as Steinem, ‘architect’ of women’s equality, dies

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday said she was “heartsick” over the death of Gloria Steinem, a well-known activist, feminist and “architect” of women’s equality.

Steinem died in her New York City home on Wednesday. She was 92.

“Oh, Gayle, I’m heartsick, as I think everyone who not only knew her but followed her, was inspired and challenged by her,” Clinton said in a phone call to “CBS Mornings” with co-host Gayle King.

She described Steinem’s activism as “rooted in optimism, and that’s a moral choice.”

“She was one of the architects of the entire structure of women equality,” the former first lady said. “I mean, tearing down those obstacles to young women being able to participate where their talents and hard work took them.”

Clinton credited Steinem for creating opportunities for many women over the decades, including making “it possible for Sally Ride to be an astronaut … she stood behind women in Congress who passed Title IX to open up opportunities in sports and academics for girls.”

“And she wasn’t on the Supreme Court when Roe v. Wade was decided, but her voice and her activism was behind that, and with all the setbacks that we’ve seen over the last decade or so, I want her voice to remain in our heads,” she added.

The former secretary of State also recalled Steinem’s support for Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Clinton said she got to know them both and that Steinem would talk about how “what women have done for literally millennia to come together to work together, to help make life better.”

“She had this concept of signal fires, where people would signal by setting a fire on one mountain to the other mountain that something was going to happen or we need to get together,” she continued. “I’m trying to think of Gloria as an eternal signal fire. I really do.”

Steinem started her career as a journalist in 1963, covering Playboy under Hugh Hefner and profiling The Beatles’s John Lennon. Later that decade, she met women who spoke out in support of abortion rights. She told The Associated Press in 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, that this was “the beginning of activism for me.”

“Either our control over our own bodies is equal, regardless of sex or race, or we’re not living in a democracy,” she told the AP.

She founded Ms. Magazine in 1972, which grew its subscriber base in the years that followed and continues to this day, published by the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Steinem faced backlash, once hearing a woman who called in to Larry King’s talk show on CNN in 1990 tell her to “rot in hell” for ruining “the beautiful American family.” Former President Nixon was once taped in the Oval Office ridiculing her magazine, prompting Steinem to call him “the most sexually insecure chief of state since Napoleon” during a National Press Club event in 1972.

Criticisms from the president turned to praise decades later when former President Obama awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

“Because of her work across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve but she also changed how women thought about themselves,” Obama said at the time.