Unflinching campaigner for women’s and civil rights who galvanised a generation of activists

Gloria Steinem, who has died aged 92, was a writer, community organiser, political campaigner and a charismatic feminist activist who called herself “an entrepreneur of social change”. She spent much of her life on the road, often accompanied by equally committed fellow campaigners. Steinem loathed public speaking, but during two years travelling in India in her 20s, she moved from village to village, with “a sari, a cup and a comb” in a group countering religious intolerance. She said she learned then, as Gandhi taught, that a message was all the more powerful delivered “eye to eye”.

Steinem, unlike some of her contemporaries, never recanted or modified her many causes, which included civil rights, violence against women, and the struggle for equality. She continued to argue that every economics course ought to start not with production but with reproduction, and an understanding of the patriarchal instinct to restrict a woman’s right to contraception and abortion.