1.
I think the phrase we’re looking for is “social-democratic anti-communism.” She was a metonym of the twentieth century, which is currently dying. She was the “great popularizer” of women’s liberation (as Rebecca Traister puts it), and a stalwart warrior for the indispensable freedom that is abortion; a media talent committed to building big working-class and multiracial, anti-racist constituencies in order to hegemonize a widely compelling—but, again, profoundly anti-communist—version of anti-patriarchy politics and culture. Her writing was charming; I recommend this review by Sari Edelstein of her little-known paean to one of the very best of human activities, namely, lying by the sea: The Beach Book.
2.
Naturally, someone who popularizes and mainstreams is going to have radical enemies. Revolutionary feminists, such as those in the Redstockings collective, fought her brand of feminism from the jump; a dossier in the women’s liberation journal off our backs, in July 1975, dedicated a great deal of space to Ms.’s counterinsurgent and co-optational goals. Palestinian feminists were always abjected within Steinem’s activism, of course. This was true in 1975, when Steinem opposed anti-colonial feminists’ efforts to censure Zionism as a form of racism at the UN, and it remained true all the way to 2023, when Steinem was the lead signatory on a letter promoting the rape-atrocity propaganda against Gazans used to manufacture consent for the Zionist genocide. Sex-working feminists, too, from the ’60s on, pointed out the classist humanitarianism of her self-authorization to speak on behalf of their industry after just a few days working for Hugh Hefner undercover in 1963. (As the sex-worker liberationist Carol Leigh reflected: “Gloria Steinem went to work as a Playboy bunny and then trashed them”; crusading for decades against decrim. In the words of SWOP Behind Bars: “She wore the costume for a month. We wear it for life.”)
3.
The facts of her life produce an impression of infinite contradictoriness. This was someone who lived for almost a hundred years and did all of the following: oppose the war in Vietnam, quash a resolution proposed by anti-Zionist feminist women at the UN, attempt to prevent the decriminalization of sex work, march alongside Dolores Huerta and the UAW, join the DSA, and campaign for Hillary Clinton. We’re talking about a sincere patriot, empathetic pro-Black girlboss, dyed-in-the-wool Zionist, vegetarian animal rights supporter, pro-immigrant pacifist, and bona fide believer in sisterhood. In other words, she contained multitudes of things in apparent mutual tension with one another, albeit in her case the overall effect was anti-communist and pro-American, even as it was anti-sexist and beneficial, in particular, to “working women” in the imperial core.
4.
She was one of the few members of the ’60s student movement to take government money for anti-communist purposes knowingly. But don’t get me wrong, it is laughable, and intensely misogynist, to infer that this somehow means that either women’s liberation or Steinem herself was a CIA op. Steinem’s well-documented affection and respect for her short-term employer reveals precisely zero large-scale conspiracies embedded in the project of liberal American feminism. Rather, it just helps illustrate something that is far more depressing, actually: Steinem didn’t need Central Intelligence handlers in order to voluntarily create a socialism-tinged counterrevolutionary movement architecture. For decades, without covert funding or formal mission, she always projected just enough radical credibility to be effective in nudging social movements away from class war and anti-colonialism and toward peaceful electoralisms. Again, her being a true-believing social-democratic “humanist” was precisely what made it consequential, i.e., pacifying and diluting of certain forms of women’s rage, when she chose to prop up American imperialism, support Israeli settler colonialism, and normalize capitalism. Contra the kooky and/or campist conspiracists on the internet right now, she wasn’t defusing radicalism on purpose or as part of some kind of plot or plan. (But isn’t that worse?)
5.
Calling Steinem an exponent of “white feminism” is very much not it; hers was, in fact, a very intersectionalist form of progressivism that functioned—mostly without CIA funding—as a form of counterinsurgency, even as it benefited millions of women. That’s right: There are counterrevolutionary forms of progressive attentiveness to “intersectionality.” You can read Ash Bohrer on this. Even though intersectionality was originally theorized, as “triple jeopardy,” by revolutionary anti-imperialists like Frances Beal in the Third World Women’s Alliance, and later by lesbian socialists in the Combahee River Collective, there was a concerted effort by liberals in the ’90s to turn the term into a referent for a profoundly non-radical, legalistic approach to oppressions. (Is anybody surprised that Kimberlé Crenshaw has seemingly said nothing, and risked nothing for, Palestine? That’s what I thought.)
6.
All beloved cultural leaders fuck up sometimes. It’s great that Steinem got back into Alice Walker’s good books, after the latter quit Ms. because of its intractable whiteness. It’s great that Steinem published the Communist Party firebrand Angela Davis in her pages. It’s great that, about a decade ago, she offered a partial apology for the viscerally transphobic things she said and did in the ’70s and ’80s, when she was a sister to Jan Raymond, for example writing an essay attacking Renée Richards (“If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot,” published in Ms. magazine’s February 1977 issue). As the philosopher Kate Manne says—“a woman does not have to be completely free of missteps throughout her life in order to be celebrated.”
7.
But there is no overlooking Steinem’s bourgeois whorephobia and lifelong insistence on the carceral “Nordic model” for regulating prostitution in the face of overwhelming proof that such approaches only harm sex workers. There is no overlooking her role in the overturning of UN Resolution 3379, which moved to (correctly) define Zionism as a form of racism. For a liberal thinker like Manne, perhaps, the fact that Steinem was “an intersectional feminist” (i.e., worked with Black and Indigenous US women—100 percent true) is the only real or relevant determinant of Steinem’s honor in the context of the discourse catalyzed by her death. This is because, in Manne’s view, anti-communism was totally defensible in the ’70s, and implicitly remains defensible in her view today. Naturally, I fundamentally disagree. Here is what made me spit out my coffee: In her post honoring Steinem, Manne invokes the lifelong, unchanged, “deeply humane” values of her formerly right-wing (now left-leaning), anti-communist, political-scientist father Robert Manne in an attempt to illustrate how, like Steinem, you can apparently have no real beef with the CIA and yet have an “aversion to atrocities.”
8.
It behooves all feminists to say “rest in peace” to Gloria Steinem—but not “rest in power,” which is a phrase that we Red feminists reserve for revolutionaries. In saying “rest in peace,” I am channeling the gorgeous generosity of the sex workers who have come forward with nice things to say about Steinem this week even though the woman worked against the decriminalization of sex workers’ labor her whole life. (I’m thinking, here, of Annie Sprinkle, who posted about Steinem that “people can change” and that “many sex workers did (indirectly) benefit from her efforts”; similarly, the aforementioned incarcerated sex worker solidarity project SWOP Behind Bars called her fearless.)
For what it’s worth, I would likely fail to muster either form of “R.I.P.” over the grave of the editor of Sisterhood Is Powerful, Robin Morgan, who also died last week and was a straightforward enemy, in my opinion, of human and gender liberation.
It is worth considering, on the other hand, saying “rest in power” at the grave of the communist sympathizer Marilyn Monroe, who was born one hundred years ago this June, and who fought for her sisters, entre autres, against HUAC. Monroe’s gender pleasure intensely disgusted and embarrassed Steinem. Yet what the two women had in common was substantial: notably, being glamorous and ingenious survivors of a working-class childhood shaped by poverty and an ill mother’s psychiatric incarceration. My favorite of the two, however, had nothing good to say about the American security state.
Originally published on Sophie Lewis’s Patreon.
