Before becoming one of America’s most celebrated “feminist” icons, Gloria Steinem [who died yesterday in New York City at age 92] first participated in a CIA-backed anti-communist project that organized American youth participation in anti-communist international festivals during the Cold War. She later publicly acknowledged the CIA connection and defended her involvement. Her actual history matters because CIA anti-communism was not some politically neutral commitment to democracy; it was deeply entangled with U.S. imperialism, the suppression of freedom movements, and the policing of which forms of liberation were considered acceptable.
And that contradiction matters when we talk about her white feminism.
The feminism that became nationally legible was disproportionately shaped by white, middle-class women whose experiences were often treated as universal, and Steinem helped facilitate that process. Meanwhile, Black women, Indigenous women, women of color more broadly, and working-class women had long been articulating forms of liberation that could not be reduced to gender alone. Women confronting colonialism, racism, and economic exploitation understood that oppression operates through multiple, interconnected systems, not through a single axis of inequality.
That is the structural violence of white feminism: it can oppose forms of sexism that harm privileged women while reproducing racial and class hierarchies over whose suffering is centered, whose politics are considered legitimate, and who gets remembered as the face of women’s liberation.
We do not need to pretend Steinem was responsible for feminism.
Not now. Not ever.
I had to deal with the twisted legacy of Gloria Steinem constantly as a writer, educator and activist from Toledo, Ohio, which was also her home town where she was born and raised. She was held up as some kind of revolutionary saint despite doing more harm than good for this world. Instead of the mythology built up around her, her actual story tells a very different reality about what she stood for. In my eyes she reduced feminism to a shallow identity politics devoid of class and race politics and completely devoid of a critique of the devastating policies of the U.S. Empire around the world. She was a tool of the elite forces from her career as an anti-communist operative for the CIA, her long lasting friendship with Henry Kissinger, to her campaigning for zionist war criminal Hillary Clinton and coming up with the Bernie Bros slander.
Many of the headlines commemorating the death of Gloria Steinem at 92 read like this: “Feminist icon, trailblazer, journalist.” They leave out one very salient episode of her career: Steinem’s years as a paid CIA operative running the anti-communist Independent Research Service in the late ’50s and ’60s. There was, of course, nothing “Independent” about the “service.” It was an agency front group, fully funded by the CIA. The “research” it did was on left-leaning student activists, often conducted by sending undercover operatives to spy on their activities on campuses and at youth festivals. Though Steinem eventually cut ties with the Agency, her brand of feminism downplayed class-based politics.
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has passed away. I must admit, when I observed her career early on I was enthralled with her journalism and organizing. But as the months turned into years, she was sadly absorbed into the very system she fought against.
Here’s some evidence: After several government documents were declassified, it was revealed Steinem worked for the CIA. From 1958 to 1962, Steinem served as the director of the Independent Research Service (IRS), an organization established and funded by the CIA. Its mission was to counter Soviet influence at youth events worldwide, specifically by sending American non-communist students and activists to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962).
When the magazine Ramparts exposed widespread CIA funding of youth and student groups in 1967, Steinem spoke openly about her role. She confirmed that she knew the CIA was bankrolling the organization and defended the arrangement. Steinem famously stated that “if I had a choice I would do it again.”
Transitioning into the 1990s, Steinem became a defender of the sexual predator, Bill Clinton. She drew sharp criticism for a March 1998 New York Times op-ed titled “Feminists and the Clinton Question,” in which she defended President Clinton against allegations made by Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky. Steinem wrote that even if the allegations were true “for the sake of argument,” Clinton was not guilty of sexual harassment and argued that his conduct amounted to a “clumsy sexual pass.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, she was a surrogate for Bill Clinton’s war criminal wife, Hillary Clinton. During an appearance on Bill Maher’s program, she suggested young women were only joining Bernie Sanders’ campaign to meet boys. She told Maher, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, 'Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” She later apologized.
For me, I place Steinem in the same category as a figure like Noam Chomsky: people I recognized as heroes, only to be disappointed and let down as they were slowly absorbed into the Deep State and neoliberal structure. Yes, I don’t deny Steinem inspired a lot of women, but how many of those women know the aforementioned about her?
Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA and called its members “enlightened,” “liberal,” and “honorable.” She never apologized and instead said she “would do it again.” The CIA overthrew governments, propped up dictators, murdered opponents, and aligned itself with the most oppressive forces on the planet. Its interventions led to severe and systematic repression of women in countries around the world. Some of its agents used sexual abuse as a technique of coercion. Workplace sexual abuse was common within its own ranks. And the agency itself systematically discriminated against women. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theater?”
Steinem’s concept of a “liberated woman” (who, as she quipped, has sex before marriage and a job after) directly contradicted the the very heart of the radical movement’s argument – that women are oppressed as a class and can’t make themselves free individually.
Where did her politics come from? She seemed have one foot in the establishment from the start, dating John F. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen; then Franklin Thomas, who would soon lead the Ford Foundation; and, in the 1980s, real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman. Vivian Gornick recalled, “Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with Establishment figures; we had only ourselves.”
[. . .] By the late 1980s, Steinem was famous for Ms. and for being the radical feminist but had not yet written a book laying out her vision of feminism (the anthology Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions in 1983 collected her writing in Ms. and elsewhere).
When it finally came, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) affirmed everything about her politics that had dismayed the radicals who started the movement. The book, which received a six-figure advance, continued the women’s magazine line that women needed to make internal changes.
“Without self-esteem, the only change is an exchange of masters; with it, there is no need for masters,” she wrote. Of course, we don’t have masters because we need them but because they need us. This basic inversion was symptomatic of her politics.
By contrast, women’s liberation feminists argued that women, like other oppressed people, are in constant struggle against our bonds – a concept they called the “Pro-Woman Line” – in fact, we take every bit of space available and find ingenious workarounds even when there is none. It was discrimination, exploitation, punishment, and constant everyday pressure that constrained us. This hard-won analysis was developed through the main program of the movement, consciousness-raising.
Ms. watered down this important organizing tool, publishing a guide to consciousness-raising that used the name and the form but missed the substance, reducing it to a therapy group where women blew off steam and got sisterly support. The original idea was to use the data that emerged in testimony to assess women’s true situation, dig at the root cause, and analyze who benefits. The program was inspired by the Southern civil rights movement’s “tell it like it is” public testifying and had parallels in the Chinese Revolution’s “speak bitterness” sessions. It was not intended as a safe space.
As corporate attacks in the late 1970s and early ’80s destroyed unions and working-class living conditions and wages plunged for all workers, Betty Friedan and feminist radicals alike argued that advancing women’s equality now required confrontation with corporate power to get guarantees of childcare and health care, paid family leave, and shorter work hours for everyone. Friedan called it the “second stage” of feminism in a book by that name. Redstockings called for the abolition of private health insurance companies and a robust social wage, to give women independence from men and employers.
The Ms. wing of the movement fragmented into thousands of non-profits, competing for grants from rich people by each proposing “winnable” small-bore solutions to the wreckage left by the employer offensive. This blinkered feminist vision was reflected in the Democratic Party establishment. Meanwhile, long hours, low pay, and worsening conditions for raising kids made women vulnerable to a right-wing nostalgia for to the “glorious thirty” postwar years of family-supporting jobs and stay-at-home moms.
[. . .] Women’s liberation movement pioneers, to a woman, came out of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the student left. They believed that consistent feminism leads to socialism, and vice versa. Following Simone de Beauvoir, they wanted to dig deep and abolish the exploitation of women and the oppression required to maintain it. Starting in the 1960s, they planned and built a successful radical movement that profoundly changed the situation of women in the United States and reverberated worldwide.
It’s a crime that their movement was for fifty years personified by someone who never shared its goals.
As the media machine prepares to unleash a flood of fawning tributes, the usual suspects will inevitably honor Gloria Steinem – a spectacle revealing little about liberation and everything about their own bankrupt politics, brazen opportunism, willful blindness to historical fact, and the hackneyed claims to “complexity” and “nuance” held so dear by these intellectual mercenaries.
How does one assess a life after it ends? Those who benefit and are in a good position in this system will honor Gloria Steinem for contributing to stabilizing a system oppressive to many and dis-aligning them from revolutionary ideas – this is not what women want and need.
The death of Gloria Steinem will undoubtedly unleash an avalanche of sanitized obituaries, performative tributes, and ruling-class hagiography. Western media will mourn her as a “groundbreaking icon” and a pioneer for gender equality. But for the global majority – the millions of women across the Third World and the working-class masses who remain crushed beneath the boot of imperialist exploitation – her passing marks the end of a legacy that fundamentally weaponized feminist rhetoric to protect the empire.
Steinem did not liberate women; she weaponized women’s liberation to serve the interests of U.S. hegemony. The foundational sin of her career was never a mere footnote: her early leadership of the CIA-backed Independent Research Service in the late 1950s and 1960s was explicitly designed to undermine anti-imperialist, socialist, and communist youth movements at international youth festivals. When exposed, Steinem didn’t apologize; she defended the covert arm of the U.S. imperialism, describing its operatives as "liberal and honorable." This was not an innocent blunder of youth, but the blueprint for her entire career.
Through Ms. magazine and her manufactured status as the singular, polished face of “second-wave feminism,” Steinem pioneered a dangerous model of liberal counter-insurgency. As radical feminists, Black panthers, and anti-capitalist women were rising up to demand the dismantling of the triad of imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, Steinem offered a palatable alternative: bourgeois, reformist faux feminism.
This imperial feminism detached gender oppression from its economic and geopolitical roots. It told American women that liberation meant climbing corporate ladders, breaking glass ceilings inside warmongering state institutions, and achieving parity within an exploitative system – all while the very empire housing them carpet-bombed, starved, and destabilized nations across the Global South. By framing patriarchy as an abstract cultural enemy separate from class struggle and U.S. military domination, her brand of activism effectively depoliticized the feminist movement and severed its solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles worldwide.
It was precisely this co-optation that radical groups like Redstockings rightly called out in 1975. They recognized Ms. magazine and Steinem’s elevated media stature as a parallel organization meant to channel radical anger into benign electoral politics. When challenged on her intelligence connections and corporate backing, her apparatus used legal threats and publishing pressure to suppress internal dissent, silencing the very radical women whose ideas she had watered down and monetized.
For the global majority, Steinem’s legacy is not one of freedom, but of co-optation. Her pro-imperialist ideology gave feminist cover to U.S. soft power, making Western liberal democracy look progressive while its economic structures continued to siphon labor and resources from women in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She normalized a brand of identity politics that allows female CEOs, drone operators, and politicians to be celebrated as triumphs for “womanhood,” even as their actions inflict violence on millions of impoverished women globally.
We must refuse the myth-making that surrounds her death. True liberation for women will never come from the handshakes of CIA handlers, corporate sponsors, or ruling-class media elites. It will come from the destruction of the imperialist, capitalist structures that Steinem worked so tirelessly to legitimize. Her death should serve as a stark reminder: a feminism that aligns itself with the empire is no feminism at all – it is merely the soft edge of oppression.
– Sarah Raymundo
“An Anti-Requiem for Gloria Steinem,
A Cold War Icon (1934-2026)”
via social media
September 3, 2026
Related Off-site Links:
Gloria Steinem, Trailblazing Journalist and Activist, Dies at 92 – Juliana Kim (NPR, September 3, 2026).
Gloria Steinem Was the Godmother of Neoliberal Feminism – Jenny Brown (Jacobin, September 4, 2026).
Gloria Steinem: The CIA, White Feminism, Intersectionality and COINTELPRO – United Panther Party (September 3, 2026).
Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Was An Anti-Communist CIA Operative Who Kept Feminism From Discussing Class – Jon Queally (Medium, February 11, 2024).
Image: Glenn Lowson.
