NEW YORK CITY – On September 2, Gloria Steinem, agent of liberal feminism, died at the age of 92 in her New York City apartment. Rising from modest beginnings, she became one of the most prominent representatives of liberal feminism in the United States, presenting herself as a champion of reproductive rights, institutional access, and workplace advancement for women. These demands were narrow enough to be absorbed by capitalism, giving liberal feminism a respectable appearance while severing women’s liberation from class struggle. By narrowing liberation to equal participation within existing institutions, Steinem helped popularize a feminism that sought greater inclusion in the structures of capitalism rather than their overthrow. In this sense, the progressive image surrounding her activism functioned as political cover for a career deeply compatible with the interests of the existing order, a fact made all the more significant by her early work directly for a CIA-funded organization.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Steinem was a director of a student organization called the Independent Research Service, or ISR, which was funded by the CIA. On the CIA’s dime, the organization attended events like the USSR-run Vienna Youth Festival of 1959, on which they published a report in 1960. The report is not subtle in its support of the American government line, harshly criticizing the “exaggerations” of speakers who discussed imperialism and the severe oppression of national minorities in the U.S., and proudly discussing the efforts of “independent” American delegates (as opposed to the communist ones, so apparently including themselves,) to disrupt the festival and manipulate delegates from “uncommitted” countries.
When CBS exposed the CIA’s covert funding of a wide range of organizations in 1967, Steinem rushed to defend the Agency, describing its personnel as “enlightened, liberal, non-partisan activists.” She claimed that she accepted the money because, unlike private funders, the Agency did not attempt to dictate the political line of the Independent Research Service. The CIA simply had no need to do so.
The central issue is not that Steinem committed some personal moral lapse by taking “dirty money,” nor that CIA funding corrupted an otherwise independent political project. The CIA chose to fund Steinem and her circle because their politics were already compatible with the needs of U.S. Imperialism. Their liberalism posed no threat to the existing order. It functioned as a controlled form of dissent, channeling legitimate anger into reforms that left the foundations of class rule intact and helped shield U.S. Imperialism from deeper challenge.
These funding operations took place alongside U.S. efforts to undermine developing movements domestically, in particular through the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The organizations funded by the CIA served as political camouflage for U.S. Imperialism abroad and as mechanisms of containment at home, dressing military aggression in progressive language while diverting potential radicals into forms of activity harmless to the capitalist-imperialist system. When Steinem came to focus primarily on feminism around 1970, she continued to play those roles whether she was getting paid for it or not.
Steinem’s women’s movement won legal victories, such as Title IX, Roe v. Wade, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The concessions they won were real for some, but they were won at a cost. They separated demands for women’s equal treatment from the issues of childcare, unequal pay, economic dependence, and unpaid domestic labor that heavily affected the lives of working class and nationally oppressed women.
Decades later, some of their most significant victories, such as Roe v. Wade have been revoked, and despite legal equality, women continue to be overrepresented in lower-wage jobs and are more likely to face poverty. Until recently, the U.S. used the concessions it made to the liberal women’s movement to position itself as an international leader on women’s rights, but now that camouflage is being left behind. The movement Gloria Steinem championed buried the roots of women’s oppression in private property, the family form, and class society beneath a politics of accommodation with the capitalist-imperialist system, reducing liberation to a more equal place for women within the machinery of exploitation itself. A machinery that increasingly sheds its progressive disguise and reveals the naked force of class rule.
[Image Source: Barack Obama awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Gloria Steinem in the East Room at the White House on Nov. 20, 2013]
