There is no “perfect” model for anything. Whether it’s politics, economic systems or, in this instance, feminism. Yet, in death, the people that are meant to embody a particular “cause” are inevitably elevated to a status of near-sainthood (or simply as the “personification of the women’s movement,” per The New York Times). Gloria Steinem is one such person. For, in the wake of the announcement that she had died on September 2nd, the outpourings of love and gratitude that flooded various news outlets and social media feeds were on a level that might have almost matched what came for Dolly Parton, were it not for the fact that she, too, had just died, and there’s only so much love and gratitude to go around for women.
As is often the case with the deaths of icons, celebrities and other gradations of famous people, little attention was given to the ways in which Steinem had, in many ways, failed. In her scenario, as the oft-touted “singular representative” of feminism…at least of the second-wave variety. And her failure wasn’t just because she was so clearly the face of white feminism—the “varietal” that still dominates, if and when feminism in its true form is thought of at all—and seemed to have little ability to “branch out” of that “sector.” But perhaps most significantly because she was a CIA lackey/informant via the “Independent Research Service”—a name with all the expected vagueness of a CIA covert op (you know, like “Operation Ajax”). And while many were aware of/remembered Steinem’s strong ties to one of the most nefarious offshoots of the U.S. government, it seemed that just as many were willing to gloss over how fucked up that actually is when going over the achievements of Steinem’s life (particularly as a significant bulk of those achievements, in some way or another, stemmed from her her links with the CIA).
The staunch Steinem defenders might try to remind that it was she herself who “came clean” about being an “operative” in 1967 articles for The New York Times and The Washington Post. However, a 1975 lambasting by Gabrielle Schang (titled “Radical Feminists Won’t Be MsLed”) puts that “confession” into perspective by mentioning, “Just prior to this [self-]exposure, Ramparts magazine had disclosed that the organization was CIA-funded. The purpose of the Independent Research Service seems to have been to subvert communist-minded youths, on an international basis.” Indeed, at this point in time, the U.S. was at the height of the Cold War, while still in the infancy of having sanctioned the existence of an entity like the CIA. Which meant that anything like “guardrails” to limit the extent of what said “organization” could do (like, say, pick up unsuspecting people off the street and try mind control experiments on them) weren’t really in place. Oh sure, it’s still an unchecked, insidious force now, but nothing like it was in those Cold War decades (well, one can only hope).
As for some of the information that the Ramparts article (“National Student Association and the CIA”) unearthed, among the most relevant to Steinem being a traitor to her so-called kind (radicals) is the following: “In the period between 1961 and 1965 [the Independence Foundation, which, elsewhere in the article, is confirmed to ‘have received regular contributions from four of these CIA-linked Funds: Price, Borden, Kentfield and Edsel’] spent $180,000 in financing an interesting operation known as the Independent Research Service (IRS [not the best acronym]). This was the organization that made life so miserable for the organizers of the communist-leaning world youth festivals in Vienna in 1959, and Helsinki in 1962. The Independent Research Service actively recruited a delegation of hundreds of young Americans to attend the festivals in order to actively oppose the communists.” The years in question, 1959 and 1962, coincided with Steinem being the director of the outfit.
As for Steinem gleefully “self-exposing” this in a publication like The Washington Post, it’s been brought up a few times that she was something of a forever-indebted “stooge” to Katharine Graham, the famed publisher who once told the CIA in 1988, “There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” It was Graham that a 1974 cover of Ms. deemed to be “‘the most powerful woman in America.’ Feminist Revolution brought up the $20,000 she had initially invested in Ms. to support their contention that Steinem was installed as a spokesperson of the women’s movement by the ‘rich and powerful.’” This from a 1979 article by Nancy Borman titled “Inside the CIA with Gloria Steinem.”
To be sure, Graham’s ownership of Newsweek was also a source of suspicion in the abovementioned Schang article, when she notes, “Newsweek became the most enthusiastic mass-circulating magazine promoting the Independent Research Service and later Gloria Steinem as an individual.” Especially after Graham’s purchase of 20k worth of stock in Ms. before the first issue was even conceived. Then there was the strange coinciding of Steinem becoming the “spokesperson” for the women’s liberation movement not long after admitting to working for the CIA and loving it. As confirmed by her comments in The Washington Post, “I found them liberal and farsighted and open to an exchange of ideas.” Try telling that to someone subjected to MKUltra around this same time.
Steinem’s rise to fame as the feminist is often attributed to being “installed” at the then newly-founded New York magazine by Clay Felker, a fellow CIA operative in the “IRS,” with Redstockings describing that turn of events in a 1975 exposé called “Redstockings on Gloria Steinem and the CIA” as follows,
Felker was Steinem’s editor at Esquire, where her first freelance pieces were published. Felker hired her as contributing editor to New York magazine in 1968 and booked publicity spots for her on radio talk shows. Felker put up the money for the Preview issue of Ms. in January, 1972, a large part of which appeared as a supplement to the 1971 year-end issue of New York magazine. In effect, it was Felker who made Steinem famous by giving her a platform from which to establish her women’s liberation credentials. These facts are all part of the public record.”
In the article from New York magazine that first put Steinem on the national radar, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” in 1969, she writes, “The older, middle-class women come first, the ones who tried to play subordinate roles in the suburbs according to the post-war-baby-boom-women’s magazine idyll but found Something Missing.” She might as well have stopped at the sentence, “The older, middle-class women come first.” For that has largely been what her brand of feminism has helped to buttress. In no small part because of how in league she was with such patriarchal institutions from the get-go. And it was for this reason that the radical feminists of a group like Redstockings were, well, rather disgusted by Steinem and her behavior, with Schang also bringing them into her story by stating that, “Ms. seems to be the voice of women’s liberation, when in reality it has become a substitution for the movement itself. The Redstockings women point to a typical CIA-intelligence technique they see operating here, the systematic creation and/or support for a ‘parallel’ movement or organization which provides an alternative to real radicalism. They attempt to show how this subtle, yet mammoth manipulation of women by clandestine elements of the corporate structure transpired.”
One of the ways they attempted to do this was by publishing Feminist Revolution, “a multi-faceted analysis of the women’s liberation movement edited by members of Redstockings,” as Borman describes it. In addition to being an “indictment of liberals, lesbian pseudo-leftists and foundation grant feminists,” it offered a searing account of Steinem and her CIA ties. And while one might not assume that a major publisher like Random House would deign to take on such a political hot potato, the interest in and sales of the self-published version (which sold 5,000 copies—a coup then, but a blockbuster bestseller by today’s standards) caught the attention of the “big leagues.” However, the Steinem/CIA chapter in the original version of the book, “Agents, Opportunists and Fools,” proved to be problematic for Random House’s then president, Robert Bernstein. Problematic in the sense that Steinem herself flounced into his office crying “libel” and threatening legal action against Random House if the chapter on her and the CIA wasn’t removed. Even though, prior to this moment, also per Borman, “Feminist Revolution had passed an initial libel reading by Random House’s legal department on March 2nd [1976], and a contract was signed in the office that March morning. Twenty thousand copies of the book were scheduled to hit the stores.”
No matter to Steinem. Who seemed to have the kind of clout and “friends in high places” that spooked Bernstein enough to concede. No small feat from a man who was known as a bulldog when it came to defending free speech. But, as Borman would also add in her own list of suspicious things about Steinem,
No one knows what Steinem and Bernstein said in their private meeting, and it may have just been a coincidence that, within weeks Random House was blitzed with similar threats from other people and groups mentioned in the CIA chapter; Clay Felker, Women’s Action Alliance, Warner Communication, Franklin Thomas, the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women’s Voters, and Katharine Graham. But, in any case, publication of Feminist Revolution was delayed nearly three years; the printing run was cut to 12,000, despite 13,000 advance orders; and when the book was finally released last month, the chapter on Gloria Steinem and the CIA had been deleted in its entirely.”
Sure, some would argue that it was Steinem’s right to “defend” her reputation. But perhaps only if that reputation was no longer in line with being presented as a “radical” feminist (what’s more, her reaction most definitely falls under the category of, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”—in other words, she had something to hide). Or rather, “radical” by mainstream standards. And, to that point, it’s hardly a coincidence that Steinem was summarily hand-picked by the Establishment to be the “representative” of feminism. She was attractive, but not “distractingly” so, well-educated and white, but not “too” white (a.k.a. she was Jewish). And since the Establishment was fully aware that there was no stopping “progress,” they figured that perhaps they ought to help shape what that progress looked like (literally) themselves.
In this regard, when some women still bother to ask themselves why things have gone so backwards again from that presumed point of progress in the late 1960s and early 1970s, perhaps it’s worth looking at the “personification of the women’s movement” at that time. A woman who posed no real threat to the status quo at all. Even as she rallied against marriage by calling it an “unconstitutional contract with one party having the financial responsibilities and the other charged with providing domestic and sexual services,” Steinem eventually married David Bale (a.k.a. father to Christian) in 2000, reasoning that the institution of marriage had changed since the days when she was decrying it.
In a similar fashion, she would attempt to somewhat later mitigate one of the most despicable things she ever said publicly and in writing. Those things relating to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that broke in 1998. The year, apparently, when Steinem began to show undeniable signs of being a product of the baby boomer generation by automatically siding with “the man” in matters of sexual harassment. This became patent in a breezy, but nonetheless self-damning op-ed in The New York Times published in March of 1998, not long after the scandal initially broke in January. In the article, titled “Feminists and the Clinton Question” (also known as “Why Feminists Support Clinton”), Steinem insists that Bill Clinton did no fundamental wrong in his behavior with Monica Lewinsky, or the other women he engaged in “sexual relations” with, because she deems consent to have been at play (never mind that the definitions of consent tend to mutate when power dynamics of that nature are in effect). Or, as she puts it, “Commentators might stop puzzling over the president’s favorable poll ratings, especially among women, if they understood the common-sense guideline to sexual behavior that came out of the women’s movement thirty years ago: no means no; yes means yes.”
Steinem would keep putting her foot in her mouth with the assessment, “Like most feminists, most Americans become concerned about sexual behavior when someone’s will has been violated; that is, when ‘no’ hasn’t been accepted as an answer.” But because Lewinsky “wanted it,” Steinem decreed there was no foul. As the decades wore on, her “commentary” would age about as well as milk—not unlike her comments on transgender women: “feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and uses of transsexualism.” Though she would reverse her TERF-like stance publicly in 2013, the pejorative contents of her essay, “If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot” a.k.a. “Transsexualism” (first published in 1977 in Ms. and then reprinted in her book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions), remain. Contents that once again seem to prove that Steinem had little foresight, i.e., radicalism, when it came to her brand of feminism, sticking to largely chauvinistic views of what feminism meant. Which was very much a brand in her hands, and one she funneled into selling a successful magazine (side note: the CIA, too, knew all about wielding magazines for their own ends, as the early days of literary journals like The Paris Review corroborated). And the persona that went with it. One that, as the abovementioned Redstockings article phrased it, “[drew] lines in the women’s movement” where perhaps there wouldn’t have been such prominent ones if a psyop like Steinem hadn’t been entered into the fray. Someone who championed feminism with a certain slant to it. One that could be presented with Wonder Woman-esque polish. And yes, the first book published by Ms. was, not surprisingly, a collection of Wonder Woman comics selected by Steinem.
Commenting on Steinem’s dredging up of a character that had fallen out of fashion by the 1940s, Redstockings remarked, “Wonder Woman also reflects the anti-people attitude of the ‘liberal feminists’ and matriarchists who look to mythical and supernatural heroines and ‘models’ while ignoring or denigrating the achievements and struggles of down-to-earth women. It leads to the ‘liberated woman’ individualist line that denies the need for a movement, and implies that when women don’t make it, it’s their own fault.”
That’s largely the “philosophy” of the breed of Steinem feminism that led to the “career woman” trope of 1980s movies like Working Girl and Baby Boom. Both featuring lead characters that had to “just figure out” how to rise to the top in the corporate world while still maintaining their “feminine touch.” And, on that note, Redstockings would further maintain that Steinem was little more than a corporate shill with Ms. and even Women’s Action Alliance, declaring, “Ms. owes its existence to the highest ranks of corporate America” and “Although [WAA] described itself in a 1974 mailing as ‘impoverished,’ it had already received a $20,000 grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund for the establishment of a ‘national clearinghouse information and referral service’ on the women’s movement.” More evidence, as far as Redstockings was concerned, that Steinem was very much still working for The Man (CIA or otherwise) in some capacity even after the documented years of her tenure as the director of Independent Research Service.
Of course, there will forever be those—especially baby boomer women who saw her as a lone beacon of hope and “radicalism” for their generation—that could never begrudge Steinem for any such “shortcomings” (to use understatement) as these. Indeed, Schang wrote in 1974 of Steinem’s blatant “in bed-ness” with extremely “maintain the status quo at all costs” institutions, “…there will be people who don’t perceive the implications of such a liaison and still more who will simply shrug it off.” The exact same can still be said regarding the reverent public reaction to Steinem in the wake of her death.