From the CIA plug to the icon of feminism. A critical farewell to Gloria Steinem

At the age of 92, the most famous American feminist of the 20th century passed away in New York. Besides the tributes paid to her on the left, there are voices of opposition to this beatification. In this second view, Gloria Steinem was primarily a “girl boss of Western imperialism,” and her several years of cooperation with the CIA, aimed at recruiting European youth for “American liberalism and democracy,” completely discredits her as a feminist icon.

Journalist, intellectual, co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus – an American organization established in the 1970s with the goal of increasing women's participation in politics – as well as “Ms.”, the first feminist magazine published across the United States. An activist for the right to abortion, the face of the fight against domestic and sexual violence, and all other manifestations of sexist discrimination. In 1969, when she participated as a reporter for “New York Magazine” in an event where women shared their experiences of abortion, she realized she was not alone in it – the guilt-free or shame-free way she later described her own abortion at age 22 was an invaluable contribution to fighting the abortion stigma.

Decades before #MeToo, in 1963, Steinem worked as a “bunny” at the Playboy Club and wrote about the degrading conditions women faced there – the report titled Bunny’s Tale was a breakthrough in her journalistic career, especially in terms of recognition. After its publication, Hugh Hefner ordered a halt to mandatory blood tests and gynecological examinations for “bunnies”.

Since most posthumous publications focus on Gloria Steinem’s achievements, I will allow myself to go on and spoil her reputation among her zealous followers.

Gloria Steinem and the CIA. She was not ashamed of this cooperation

There is no evidence that Gloria Steinem was an agent in the literal sense, although skeptics rightly note that this applies to most spies employed by the CIA. It is known, however, that for at least four years she served as an “asset” – an informal resource – of the American intelligence. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, she led the CIA-funded organization Independent Research Service, collaborating with the agency on a Cold War propaganda operation aimed against Soviet influence in the international youth movement. “Liberal, non-violent, honorable” – that’s how she described the CIA when the matter first came to light.

Later, she admitted that accepting secret funding was a mistake. She justified it with “naive belief that the ultimate source of the money didn’t matter,” because – as she argued – there were no orders or control attempts associated with it. The truth is, they weren’t needed. In 1967, Steinem confessed she was pleased to find “forward-looking liberals” in the government. At that time, she was a representative of the anti-communist movement, believing that the American empire could be distinguished from its most brutal elements and used as a tool to achieve “good” goals outside the USA.

From India straight into the Cold War

After graduating from Smith College in 1956, Steinem traveled to India, where she spent two years. There, she encountered the post-colonial state’s policies and the intense ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union over influence in Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world emerging from European colonialism.

After returning to the USA in 1958, she became interested in the World Festivals of Youth and Students. These were large international events organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students – structures that, during the Cold War, came under the influence of the Soviet bloc. The festivals attracted tens of thousands of young people from around the world, including recently independent countries of the Global South. For Moscow, they were part of soft power politics; for Washington, a field that could not be surrendered to the enemy. Historians Joni Krekola and Simo Mikkonen describe these events as true cultural arenas of the Cold War, where both the CIA and Soviet services tried to influence participants through organizations formally independent of the state.

In 1959, the festival was held for the first time not in a communist country, but in neutral Vienna. For American strategists, this was an exceptionally convenient moment to enter the game.

That’s when Steinem appeared.

Finesse propaganda instead of espionage cloak

In Vienna, the Independent Research Service published materials criticizing communist control over the festival, supported alternative cultural initiatives, and did everything to cause division among American participants. As Hugh Wilford writes based on historical research, Steinem also tried to control the composition of the American group so that it wouldn’t be dominated by individuals with communist sympathies.

At the same time, an extensive infrastructure of American information warfare operated around the entire operation: Radio Free Europe, publishing networks, and various organizations linked to the CIA. They distributed, among other things, banned books and materials critical of communist ideology and the Soviet system.

This does not mean that every person handing out books was a CIA employee. That was the finesse of the entire enterprise – most participants didn’t even need to know where the money came from.

Steinem knew.

Three years later, the project was repeated during the Helsinki festival. According to Krekola and Mikkonen’s research, IRS trained about 160 activists before the trip during six seminars, preparing them to fend off any criticism of the United States. The organization produced thousands of brochures and other materials. Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally demanded information about the preparations, and after the festival, he invited IRS leadership and CIA involved personnel to congratulate them on the operation.

It was not a marginal student initiative, funded by the CIA out of goodwill, but an important element of state policy.

Particularly revealing was the informational activity. In Helsinki, the newspaper “Helsinki Youth News” was published in three languages. Officially, it had a Finnish editor-in-chief, but according to archival research, the content was in practice prepared and controlled by American IRS personnel. Managing editor Ted Whittemore worked for the CIA, although not all his colleagues knew this.

The IRS information center run by Steinem also tried to influence what information about the festival reached Western media. NBC, CBS, and ABC received attractive materials showing repressive behavior by organizers. One of Steinem’s propaganda successes was the dissemination of photographs depicting the removal of banners expressing opposition to nuclear tests by both East and West.

“Liberal and farsighted, open to exchange of views”

Probably the most damaging for her later image are not the events of 1959-1962 themselves, but Steinem’s reaction to the revelation of her Cold War role a few years later.

In 1967, the magazine “Ramparts” published a detailed attack on Steinem, recalling her work at the Independent Research Service and asking whether her later position in the women’s movement could also be linked to establishment interests. After all, the CIA was certainly interested in weakening leftist, anti-system feminism by promoting its more liberal, capitalist, and pro-American version.

That’s when Steinem first expressed regret about taking money from the CIA: “In retrospect, painfully clear is that even indirect, uncontrolled funding was a mistake if it could not be publicly disclosed.”

The most tempting hypothesis – that the CIA “produced” Gloria Steinem as a liberal feminist to neutralize class struggle ideas and redirect attention to gender conflict – is also the least documented, though not unlikely.

Even before becoming a conscious feminist, Steinem belonged to a specific political tradition: American liberal anti-communism. She was not a conservative. She was not a supporter of McCarthyism. She was a liberal interested in human rights and a decolonizing world, believing that the United States could and should oppose communist influence beyond its borders.

Let’s not ignore the historical context

Today, when knowledge about CIA-led coups, including overthrowing democratically elected governments, supporting repressive regimes, secret prisons, and torture, is widely available, cooperation with the American intelligence becomes difficult to defend – at least among left circles. Although during Steinem’s infiltration activities, critics of the American intelligence agency as a tool of Western imperialism were not lacking in Europe or the USA, many liberal intellectuals and activists saw the CIA as an ally in the fight against totalitarianism.

Steinem cooperated with a specific part of the Cold War apparatus, also composed of liberal-minded and anti-McCarthyite individuals. The CIA was capable of funding not only right-wing anti-communists but also anti-communist leftists: intellectuals, students, artists, and writers, whose independence and liberal image made them more credible than official state propaganda. Hugh Wilford, describing more broadly the system of secret organizations sponsored by the CIA, emphasizes that many funded environments maintained significant autonomy and had a more leftist character than conservatives would like to admit.

Taking money from the CIA, Steinem could not have been unaware of the full scale of crimes inspired and committed by the agency, but even the knowledge available in the late 1950s and 1960s was enough to consider labeling her as “non-violent and honorable” a political choice, not just youthful naivety.

As early as 1954, the US involvement in overthrowing the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was known, although the exact mechanism of the CIA operation remained secret. The same was true of the coup against Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953: formal confirmation of the CIA’s role came much later, but suspicions of Washington and London’s involvement circulated from the very beginning.

In 1964, David Wise and Thomas Ross published the bestseller The Invisible Government, describing the CIA’s secret policies in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and Laos. The agency itself considered the publication so dangerous that it contemplated ways to block it. When Steinem in 1967 described the CIA officers she knew as “liberal,” “farsighted,” and spoke warmly of the agency itself, she was not doing so from the perspective of an unwitting twenty-something unaware of later revelations by the Church Committee. She knew that the CIA overthrows governments, supports foreign rebellions, organizes invasions, conducts covert military operations, and lies to the public about them.

Steinem, a Jewess, a Zionist

Fighting anti-Semitism was an important part of Steinem’s activities, as her father was the son of Jewish immigrants. A less popular but recurring theme in critical analyses is her attitude towards Israel and her role in creating the Jewish lobby in the USA. In 1975, she joined a committee formed by Betty Friedan opposing the campaign that led the UN General Assembly to adopt Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism and racial discrimination. The resolution was repealed in 1991.

Feminists from the Global South argued at the time that women’s emancipation could not be separated from issues of colonialism, apartheid, economic dependence, and imperialism. Some American activists and intellectuals responded that introducing these conflicts “politicized” the women’s agenda. Research on the history of these conferences shows how strongly Black, Latin American, and non-Western feminists were hindered by the American concept of universal “sisterhood,” which could erase from view the colonial and racial structures of exploitation and violence.

Steinem did not publicly identify as a Zionist, but she fully supported Israel’s right to exist as a state with a Jewish majority on lands from which over 400,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948 – without the right to return – and thousands murdered. She operated within a liberal, pro-Israeli “peace” project, not decolonization politics.

Her ties to the Zionist lobby in the USA were also complex. In 2014, she signed an open letter criticizing Mayor Bill de Blasio for a speech in which he addressed AIPAC directly, assuring that the city government would always be open to this most powerful organization within the pro-Israel lobby and would support it “in Washington or anywhere else,” because “that’s his job.” Previously, Steinem was on the advisory committee of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, also known as the Jewish Partnership for Justice and Peace, an organization that was both pro-Israeli and critical of Israeli government policies. In 2002, she accompanied Palestinian Mahy Abu-Dayyeh Shamas and Israeli Terry Greenblatt to the UN Security Council, where they called for international peacekeeping forces in occupied Palestine and women’s participation in negotiations. In 2019, after the entry ban for Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to Israel, she called Benjamin Netanyahu a “bully” and announced she would not visit the country under his government.

In 1989, Steinem supported the Jewish Peace Lobby, led by philosopher and activist Jerome Segal. It was an attempt to create an alternative Jewish force critical of AIPAC’s dominance (though not necessarily the organization itself). The Jewish Peace Lobby, like Steinem herself, supported the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories – Gaza and the West Bank.

Although during the 2016 presidential campaign Steinem was a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, contrary to online accusations, it is false to say that she generally “supported politicians financed by AIPAC.” Yes, Clinton declared herself a Zionist and had a clearly pro-Israeli agenda, but for most of Steinem’s career, AIPAC did not directly donate money to candidates. The organization had been lobbying and mobilizing individual donors for pro-Israeli politicians for decades. It only established its own PAC and super-PAC before the 2022 elections. That’s when Steinem indeed supported a candidate – Carolyn Maloney – whose campaign was co-financed by AIPAC PAC. However, it is true that she supported politicians in various ways over the decades who were supported by that organization.

For many, the deepest stain on Gloria Steinem’s feminist image is her silence regarding Israeli crimes in Gaza after October 7, 2023. She did not call them “genocide,” did not support BDS (the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement against Israel), nor the arms embargo that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, nor engaged in campaigns for a lasting ceasefire (except for participating in an online meeting with Barbara Lee in 2024, a Senate candidate who prioritized this issue).

Instead, she signed a letter to the UN Secretary-General concerning sexual violence against Israeli women during Hamas’s attack on October 7. The signatories demanded an independent investigation, accountability for perpetrators, and the release of hostages. The letter emphasized that condemning rapes as a weapon of war “does not mean support for bombing Gaza.”

She was not concerned with the well-documented sexual violence against Palestinians, which is widespread especially in Israeli detention camps. This was not changed even by reports from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories from June and September 2024, documenting forced strip searches, nudity in public places, photographing and filming naked Palestinians, sexual humiliation of men and boys, electric shocks to genitals, and other sexual tortures, including rapes.

Steinem in the tender embrace of the Democratic Party

Gloria Steinem has been closely associated with the Democratic establishment for decades and regularly supported its candidates. In 1998 – already as one of the most prominent icons of American feminism – she defended Bill Clinton amid accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior.

In the provocative article Feminists and the Clinton Question, she argued that even if the relations of Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey were true, Clinton’s behavior was not harassment in the sense repeatedly attributed to Clarence Thomas or Bob Packwood. She emphasized that Clinton “accepted rejection.” In 2017, in the #MeToo era, she said she “would not write the same today,” while also expressing satisfaction that she published that article in 1998, arguing that at the time she was afraid of expanding the concept of harassment to voluntary sexual relations.

A particularly unfortunate statement from a leftist perspective was Steinem’s comment on February 5, 2016. On Bill Maher’s show, she tried to explain why Hillary Clinton was performing poorly among young female voters. She first argued that women become more radical with age, while men tend to move toward conservatism. Then she said: “When you’re young, you think: where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” In the context of the conversation, it sounded as if Steinem was suggesting that young women support socialist Bernie Sanders not because of their political beliefs, but because they want to be where the young men are. Facing criticism, she softened this message, stating: “Regardless of whether they lean toward Bernie or Hillary, more young women are activists and feminists than ever before.”

Supporting Democrats did not exclude friendly relations with some Republicans. The most controversial to this day is her acquaintance with Henry Kissinger – a man responsible for countless war crimes and supporting dictatorships as part of US foreign policy, from Chile to East Timor. Steinem spoke admiringly of his intelligence, calling him “the only interesting man in Nixon’s cabinet.” They remained on opposite sides regarding the Vietnam War: Steinem criticized it, while Kissinger was one of the main architects personally sabotaging peace negotiations.

Steinem strongly denied the rumors that she had an affair with Kissinger. It is known, however, that she was the partner of two men at different times connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

J. Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer and former senior official of the Department of Justice, with whom she was associated for about nine years, initially collaborated professionally with Epstein in the early 1980s – during the period when he was Steinem’s partner – but decades later, he represented women accusing Epstein of sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, billionaire and media magnate Mort Zuckerman, with whom Steinem met at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, entered into a much closer social and business relationship with the most notorious pedophile of the 21st century, after his breakup with Gloria: he collaborated with Epstein on media ventures, and after Epstein’s conviction, he also used his financial services. However, there is no credible evidence that Steinem herself knew Epstein, met him, or belonged to his social circle.

Why Steinem in particular?

When reflecting on the legacy of the “world’s most famous feminist,” it’s worth considering what lies behind this grand title. Why Gloria Steinem, and not Dolores Huerta, bell hooks, Angela Davis, or one of the hundreds of activists working in unions, tenant organizations, social justice movements, and communities of Black or Indigenous women?

Steinem was not the most important – she was the most visible. Visibility also varies according to class, race, access to media, and how much a person is palatable to dominant institutions. Gloria was not only digestible – she was extremely useful.

It is also not true – as some critics from the left claim – that “she never spoke about race and class.” Over the years, she appeared at various events alongside Black, leftist feminists like Dorothy Pitman Hughes or bell hooks. The latter – a Marxist, socialist feminist icon – until her death in 2021, spoke of Steinem in the highest terms. In her 2015 text Gathering as Feminists: The Power of Sharing and Solidarity, she described her as a longtime friend and dedicated feminist activist. Hooks claimed that this relationship taught her that differences in feminist theory and politics need not preclude solidarity. Steinem also befriended Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected as chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Gloria Steinem was not a racist feminist blind to issues of class. Such a thesis is too easy to refute. The question is: why did she become the universal face of the movement, while anti-imperialist, socialist feminists remained at best secondary figures?

It is not worth denying Gloria Steinem her feminist legitimacy. An honest analysis of her legacy helps to understand the limitations of a specific feminist tradition – in this case, white and liberal, friendly to American imperialism – rather than explaining everything as personal hypocrisy of one woman.

Steinem helped women gain power within existing institutions. More radical feminist currents wanted to dismantle these institutions to create new ones rooted outside patriarchal and capitalist systems.

Steinem demanded that women be at the table. Socialist, Black feminist, anti-colonial activists, and union organizers asked who owns the table, who serves the food and at what wages, and who had their land taken where the building stands.

The post From CIA plug to feminist icon. A critical farewell to Gloria Steinem first appeared on Krytyka Polityczna.