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Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at ninety-two, in her own bed, surrounded by people who loved her. By Thursday morning, before anyone had finished laying flowers, the tribunal convened. She worked for the CIA, they said. She was a racist, they said. She was a classist, they said. Cancel the dead white woman, they said. Next case.
Here are the questions I, a leftist and a feminist who is racialized in US culture as “non-white” seek to answer here: Are these things people are saying about Gloria Steinem true? And if so, does Gloria Steinem, one of the most recognizable feminist leaders in the United States, deserve all this hate coming at her in the wake of her death?
Steinem, for those who do not know who I’m talking about, co-founded Ms., the first mass-circulation magazine that treated women as citizens instead of man-serving mommying consumers of girdles and gravy. She spent half a century on the road for reproductive freedom, for the Equal Rights Amendment, for welfare mothers and domestic workers. For women. She helped build the Ms. Foundation and the Women’s Media Center. She said, over and over, into every microphone that would take her, that she learned feminism disproportionately from Black women, and she named them — Flo Kennedy, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Alice Walker — instead of taking the credit that a lesser person would have hoarded. Barack Obama put the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck. A great many women are alive, solvent, and free of men who were killing them, because Gloria Steinem would not sit down.
Now the charges.
The CIA line refers to a real thing, stripped of its actual shape, so here is precisely what it was. Beginning around 1958, in her early twenties, Steinem worked with a Cambridge outfit called the Independent Research Service. Its mission was to recruit and fund American students to attend the Communist-sponsored World Youth Festivals — the one in Vienna in 1959, when she was twenty-five, and the one in Helsinki in 1962, when she was twenty-eight, to be an anti-communist voice there. Steinem helped organize the American delegations and ran a newspaper at the festivals. The point was to make sure non-Communist students showed up and argued back instead of handing the whole field to the Soviets. The money for it came, in part, from the CIA. The involvement ran roughly three years, and it surfaced publicly in 1967, when the Agency’s covert funding of American student groups was exposed. She never denied it. She said the people she dealt with were liberal and honorable, and that she was not ashamed of the work. A woman in her mid-twenties did a Cold War thing during the Cold War, a decade before she became the Gloria Steinem anyone is mourning or maligning. Turning a three-year stint that ended in 1962 into the master key that unlocks a whole life is not analysis. It is a party trick.
My own father, who would go on to become one of the strongest Marxist voices in American academia, was not always who he became. In his youth, influenced by other Cuban Americans he hung around with, my dad was a staunch right-winger. He even had, in high school and early in his college years, a right-wing anti-Castro radio show all about “liberating Cuba.” Then he got a PhD in sociology, specialized in the sociology of Latin America, and actually visited Cuba and realized he’d been wrong. He began to study and write about the Cuban Revolution, and he changed his mind. As people often do with the passage of time and exposure to more information. To characterize my father now, in his 80s, as a right-wing anti-Castro Cuban American would not only be completely wrong, it would reduce his entire life and humanity and growth as a person to a couple of years in his late teens and early 20s. It would be deeply dishonest. Just as it would be deeply dishonest to have characterized by Irish American grandmother as a racist when she died, because she had racist ideas when she was young and was relieved of them as she got older and saw her family diversify and learned the error of her ways. My grandmother is remembered by those of us who knew and loved her as a woman with a remarkable capacity for growth and change. I can’t imaging how the cancel culture cabal would have treated her death if she’d been famous and only remembered for that once incident (we won’t get into it here.)
The same ridiculous thing is being done now, to Steinem, by people who are more interesting in the dopamine hit they get when other social media rage-addicted “progressives” like their posts, at the expense of the entire humanity of a person who probably did more to further the cause of social justice than any of them have.
Steinem was not a CIA asset or operative. She worked with a group that was funded by the CIA, and likely did not know it. This is true for lots of people back then, and it’s true for lots of us right now. The social media apps some of these keyboard warriors use to cancel Steinem for working for a CIA-funded organization in her youth are themselves CIA-funded right now, especially TikTok and Twitter/X. You bank itself is bankrolled by the CIA. Your 401k. Your favorite movies and TV shows are likely coming from studios that get funding from the Pentagon. Every feature of American life is largely underwritten by U.S. intelligence, because the dirty little secret of the country is that intelligence organizations run the government, not the other way around, and they are in bed with every major corporation and industry. The difference with Steinem is she listened, acknowledged it, and never tried to pretend her experience was anything other than what it was.
The CIA’s Cold War apparatus has been quietly bankrolling a startling share of the past century’s culture through a front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which ran magazines in thirty-five countries. One of them, Encounter, published Borges, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow. The Agency funneled money through the Museum of Modern Art to send Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell abroad as advertisements for American freedom. It paid for international tours by the Boston Symphony. It financed the animated film of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It bankrolled the National Student Association, which is precisely how the entire web finally came apart. So if one CIA dollar in your past voids everything you ever made, then the critics sharpening their knives will need to throw out half the paintings, magazines, symphonies, and novels they cite in their own bios. Pull that thread and the whole twentieth-century canon comes down in the grave with Gloria.
The racism charge against Steinem is where you have to slow down and use the whole brain God gave you, because it contains one true thing and one fabricated thing, and the mob has fused them on purpose. I would even venture to guess the entire “cancel Gloria Steinem” social media trend originated with the CIA or some other institution that wants to divide and conquer those who are advocating for social justice at all. And too many of you just fell in line because you love the virtue signal more than virtue itself.
The true thing about Gloria and race is a family argument inside feminism, and it was legitimate. bell hooks wrote that early Ms. was pitched at white women. Alice Walker — whom Steinem championed, whose Color Purple got its wind partly because Steinem put muscle behind it — left the magazine in 1986 saying she did not feel welcome in the world it projected. That critique was correct. Second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s absolutely did center white, college-educated, professional women, and it was slow on race and class. Still is, in some circles. But here is the part the trolls skip: Steinem accepted the critique and grew from it for the rest of her life. And bell hooks, who wrote the sharpest words against Steinem’s work, later said Steinem lived anti-racism in a way most white progressives only perform. The fiercest Black critic of the writing vouched for the woman, because bell hooks, like Steinem herself, was not just one snapshot in time; both women were humans, who grew and changed their minds about things as things themselves changed, too.
The fabricated thing is a conspiracy theory that keeps mutating on TikTok: that Steinem was a CIA agent who targeted Alice Walker for the Agency, who secretly ghostwrote a Black feminist classic to turn Black women against Black men. Black feminist scholars themselves took this apart, because its rotten premise is that Black women could not possibly have built their own intellectual movement across a century of organizing — that it had to be handed to them by a scheming white lady. The conspiracy that poses as pro-Black is the one insulting Black women’s minds. Debunking it was done by the very people it claims to defend. This entire “message” seems to have been a fabrication of far-right efforts to poison and divide social justice movements, by appealing to internet addicts with no capacity for critical thought.
As for classist, that one arrives with no face on it at all. It is the shape a charge takes when someone wants the authority of an accusation without the burden of a fact. Her real record ran the other direction — toward welfare rights, toward domestic workers, toward the poor, who are overwhelmingly and disproportionately women, toward the women organizing against caste violence in India who shaped her before she was anyone.
Psychologist Melanie Klein had a name for what we are watching. She called it splitting. In the field of psychology, splitting is what happens when a person is unable to hold two seemingly contradictory truths about the same person to both be true. It is a sign of emotional and psychological arrested development, and we are seeing it play out in the United States now at a societal level.
Psychological splitting is normal in infancy and nowhere else. The infant cannot bear that the mother who feeds her is the same mother who leaves the room, so the infant invents two mothers, a perfect one and a monster, and never has to feel the unbearable thing, which is that love and disappointment live in one body. This is why toddlers will say they HATE their parent if the parent denies them a cookie they want before dinner. And the same toddler will say they have the BEST PARENT IN THE WORLD if the same parent the next hour gives them a gift.
We are doing this to a corpse. We are doing it to each other, all day, at speed. For dopamine hits. For social media hearts. To seem smarter and better than all those dumbfucks who could possibly see any good at all in a person who once did something bad.
Here is my thesis, and I have earned it: this purity mania is not moral seriousness. It is the opposite. It is what a nation does after its attention span has been ground down to eight seconds by machines built to sell your outrage back to you. You cannot hold two opposing facts about the same human being in a mind trained to hold one thing at a time. And empathy, at its most raw, is also the act of holding two things at once: Yourself, and a person who is not you. A country that has lost the ability to keep two opposing truths in one hand has, by the identical injury, lost the ability to keep complex, real human beings there at all. The shrinking of our attention took our nuance and our mercy down with it, in the same swallow. In short, people who think they’re smart are behaving as though they were not.
The purity test feels like justice, in the moment. It delivers a clean little hit — the cast-out heretic, the restored innocence of the tribe. But it has never saved anyone from anything, and has, in fact, been at the very heart and root of the worst things human beings have ever done to one another. Heresy trials did not save the Church. Struggle sessions did not save the revolution. The blocked account will not save the republic. The delicious act of casting Gloria Steinem out of memory the day after she died because she took a job in her twenties that she never denied will save us from exactly one thing, and it is the only thing we cannot afford to lose.
Our own ability to allow one another to be fully human — which is the only thing Gloria Steinem ever asked of us.
It’s interesting to me how everyone was so adoring of Dolly and proclaimed her a feminist up, down and sideways, which okay. But, her main gig was entertainment. I don’t mean to minimize her. She was as genuine as they come as a person and was a true philanthropist. But, days later, a self proclaimed feminist, a feminist who lived and breathed and evolved with feminism dies, and the effort to discredit her is immediate. The contrast is interesting. I haven’t decided yet what it means, but there’s something important going on there.
Thank you for fantastic work as always Alisa. I heard some talk about this over the couple of days and after doing my own research and reading your work too, I realised that information that discredits well known feminists should not be believed in immediately.