Gloria Steinem, the reporter who became the most recognizable figure in American feminism and stayed that way for half a century, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.

Her death was announced Thursday morning in posts on her Instagram account and on her foundation's page, which said she died peacefully surrounded by people close to her. No cause was given, CNN reported.

She was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of a traveling salesman who moved the family around the country in a camper trailer. She graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1956 and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship, ABC News reported, an experience she later credited for her instinct toward organizing rather than lecturing.

The byline came before the politics. In 1963 she spent 11 days undercover as a waitress at a Playboy Club and wrote a two-part account for Show magazine of the low pay, punishing hours and harassment the job carried. The Hollywood Reporter noted she came to regret the assignment. She wrote for New York magazine, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine, and shared an Emmy nomination in 1965 for writing on the satirical series "That Was the Week That Was."

Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971 and, decades later, the Women's Media Center. NPR reported that reproductive rights sat at the center of her work, shaped by an illegal abortion she had at 22.

Much of her life was spent on the road, speaking on campuses and in community centers rather than from a masthead. "You can't do it on the phone or on the web," she told The Associated Press in 2015, arguing that empathy requires people to be in the same room.

She popularized, though did not coin, the line about a woman needing a man the way a fish needs a bicycle. She married for the first time at 66, in 2000, to the environmental activist David Bale, who died of brain lymphoma in 2003.

She kept working. In recent years she hosted talking circles for hundreds of guests in her living room and treated the apartment as a base for organizing. She died shortly before a memoir was scheduled for release this fall, the Associated Press reported.

Her representatives asked admirers to light a candle and to send donations to Gloria's Foundation.