I had to deal with the twisted legacy of Gloria Steinem [right] 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?”
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
“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).
Honor Life of Gloria Steinem “By Organizing for Rights, Equality, and Freedom” – Jon Queally (Common Dreams, September 3, 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.
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