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Women’s Media Center Editor-in-Chief Mary Thom died in a motorcycle accident Friday. She was 68. Thom was the former executive editor of Ms. magazine, which she joined in 1972.
“We who are Mary’s friends and family haven’t absorbed her loss yet; it’s too sudden,” Women’s Media Center co-founders Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan say in a statement on the site.
Thom, Javier C. Hernández writes, “arrived at Ms. magazine convinced of the need for more scrutiny of lawmakers and their views on issues like abortion and birth control.”
She developed a system of grading politicians that quickly became one of the magazine’s most popular features.
Thom also wrote books, including “Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement, which was a bible to current Ms. editors whenever we needed to recall an historical Ms. moment,” Michele Kort writes in a blog post for the magazine.
Thom’s motorcycle was her “true love,” Hernández writes. CNN’s AnneClaire Stapleton reports she’d just picked it up after storing it for the winter. She was on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Yonkers, N.Y., when she died.
Thom edited features at the Women’s Media Center. “Mary was and will always be our moral compass and steady heart,” the center’s co-founders say in their statement.
Writers from around the world have been able to share their words and ideas because of her. Wherever her friends and colleagues gather, we will always ask the guiding question: What would Mary do?”
