Dorothy Pitman Hughes, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, dies at 84

By Michelle Watson, CNN

New YorkCNN — 

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the co-founder of one of the most prominent feminist magazines, has died, according to a funeral home in Georgia and her longtime colleague and friend Gloria Steinem.

Hughes, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, died at the age of 84 on December 1 in Tampa, Florida, according to Sconiers Funeral Home. Hughes, “passed away peacefully … at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Delethia and Jonas Malmsten,” the obituary said.

Hughes was born in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 1938, and eventually moved to New York at the age of 19 where she began working several jobs including house cleaner and nightclub singer, the funeral home said.

By the late 1960s, Hughes “organized a multiracial cooperative daycare center,” which got the attention of Steinem, the future co-founder of Ms. Magazine, who wrote a profile of the business in New York Magazine.

Shortly thereafter Steinem and Hughes began publicly speaking about the Women’s Movement, the obituary said.

Read reactions to her death.

More Black culture and history stories.