Gloria Steinem died September 3, 2026, at her home in New York City at age 92, according to PBS NewsHour. Beyond the activism she’s best remembered for, Steinem’s most enduring artifact might be a magazine she helped launch in the early 1970s that moved off newsstands faster than its own publishers believed possible.

A Test Run That Sold Out in Three Days

Before Ms. existed as its own publication, it existed as a gamble. A 300,000-copy preview issue ran as an insert inside New York magazine in December 1971, funded by editor Clay Felker, and it sold out within three days, generating another 26,000 subscription orders in the weeks that followed, according to publishing history documented on Wikipedia. That kind of immediate, no-ambiguity demand is what convinced Steinem and her co-founders, including editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Patricia Carbine, and Joanne Edgar, that a standalone national feminist magazine wasn’t a niche experiment. It was a business.

Wonder Woman Goes on the Cover, and Gets Her Powers Back

The first standalone issue hit newsstands in July 1972 with Wonder Woman striding across the cover under the headline “Wonder Woman For President.” The choice wasn’t random. DC Comics had recently stripped Wonder Woman of her superpowers, turning her into a mod-fashion secret agent with no abilities beyond martial arts, and Steinem specifically pushed back on that decision, according to the Smithsonian’s own catalog entry for the issue, held in the National Museum of American History’s collection. Editor Joanne Edgar wrote the cover essay tying the character’s Amazonian origin story to the magazine’s larger argument about strength and gender. The campaign worked: DC reinstated Wonder Woman’s original powers by January 1973, a rare case of a magazine cover story actually reshaping a comic book character’s mythology within months of publication.

A Magazine That Kept Reinventing Its Own Business Model

Ms. ran monthly from 1972 through 1987, when it shifted to quarterly publication and began cycling through owners, Fairfax Media, then American Feminists, then Liberty Media, before the Feminist Majority Foundation acquired it in 2001 and relocated its operations to Los Angeles and Arlington, Virginia, per the same Wikipedia publishing record. Steinem stayed on as an adviser after that acquisition rather than walking away entirely, keeping her name attached to the publication for close to three decades after its founding.

What made Ms. a genuine media event, rather than a well-intentioned pamphlet, was the print run selling out before the industry could decide whether the whole idea was viable. Steinem didn’t just write about a cultural shift from the sidelines. She and her co-founders bet a printing budget on it, watched a Wonder Woman cover actually rewrite a corporate decision at DC Comics within a few months, and built a magazine that outlived multiple owners and five decades of publishing upheaval. That’s the part of her career that belongs on a newsstand retrospective as much as an obituary page.