Rest In Peace, Gloria Steinem: Feminist, Beauty, CIA Soft Power Asset

Wait. What?

Gloria Steinem by Lynn Gilbert. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

The world has lost another trailblazer and cultural figure this week, I guess because the universe decided we were all getting a little too collectively chipper. Gloria Steinem has passed away at 92.

Steinem was, of course, well known for being a second-wave feminist and journalist who helped get Ms. Magazine going, turning an honorific that had an unmistakable whiff of feminism into a badge of pride in the process. She challenged norms, famously went undercover as a Playboy Bunny (which she regretted even though it was a great piece!), and helped force changes to national and global culture.

She was on my radar my whole life, of course, but I’m young enough that she was someone whose presence and influence I just took for granted and who my parents’ generation thought was a big deal but who was old and boring by the time I came around.

Yes, young people can be very stupid! Here, for example, Rebecca Solnit writes about something I didn’t even know we’d had to fight for (Wonkette affiliate link):

In 2015, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought up a 1982 Supreme Court case while hearing the case for same-sex marriage rights. “Marriage today is not what it was under the common law tradition, under the civil law tradition. […] Marriage was a relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female. […] That ended as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisana’s Head and Master Rule was struck down.”

That gave a husband, Solnit writes, “unfettered right to dispose of jointly owned property without his wife’s knowledge or consent. The test case involved a husband who mortgaged the house his wife had purchased with her earnings, to defend himself against charges of molesting their daughter.”

Nineteen-eighty-two! As Solnit wrote on Bluesky in a shocking catalog:

Steinem once told Terry Gross that she didn't marry until her sixties because “first I had to reinvent the institution of marriage.” Women had no economic equality in the workplace, no equal access, no right against marital rape, sexual harassment, and she was nearly forty when Roe vs Wade passed, which came along after Griswold v. Connecticut granting married couples birth control access and meanwhile interracial marriage rights were being fought for, and to be queer was to be criminalized and treated as mentally ill. For starters. In the US until 1978, women could be fired for being pregnant.

Gloria Steinem reported in 1969, “Forty-three states have ‘protection legislation’ limiting the hours and place a woman can work; legislation that is, as Governor Rockefeller admitted last year, ‘more often protective of men.’”

The feminist movement in which she was a leader got the legal system to address domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment and discrimination, and so much more that people don't see because they don't remember the world before those changes.

Well when she puts it that way!

In her last essay, published yesterday posthumously by the New Yorker, Steinem wrote:

As I write this, the world seems in a tailspin. Many feel that all the progress we’ve made is being reversed. When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.

It doesn’t feel that way, of course. It feels awful. But then you read the Solnit catalog and you sigh: I suppose.

Everybody knows Steinem, who was witty as all hell, had quipped “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” — so when she finally married Christian Bale’s father David Bale, a South African environmental and animal rights activist, at 66, it was because, she said, she hadn’t changed. Marriage had. And they did that.

And then it turned out she had worked for the CIA — well, okay, she’d been funded by them to go to student conferences, like they’d funded Rothko and the Boston Symphony. It turns out other people really are complex and nuanced and have a lot going on in their lives!

“Less cloak-and-dagger and more a young, energetic, global representative for American values and freedom, Steinem leveraged her underwriting to attend international youth festivals organized and otherwise ideologically dominated by America’s adversaries,” says the a post from the Miami Herald as reprinted at University of Southern California’s Center for Public Diplomacy.

“Long before the formalized concept of soft power, Steinem personified and promoted abroad the vigor and progressive nature of the U.S. youth movement,” the Herald added.

Steinem seemed to see it all as part of her work toward pushing the world to become a fairer place and saying later that she was “happy to use the Establishment’s money against the Establishment.”

But that was while she was still forming herself. She didn’t even truly discover feminism until she was in her mid-thirties — in 1969, the year, she said, that she was fully radicalized.

Her moment came when she discovered exactly how many women had actually had an abortion at some point in their lives at that time: one in three. Steinem herself had had an abortion, years before, and had considered it a matter of intense privacy. Learning that statistic changed her forever.

“Obviously, without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy,” she said in 2022.

Obviously!

She said that because it took her so long, she felt like a latecomer, someone who always had to run to keep up.

Barely two years after her feminist radicalization, in 1971 Steinem decided journalism — man, she was a terrific writer — wasn’t enough: The women’s movement needed action. She joined Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan (who haaaated her, see Rebecca Traister’s piece linked right below!), and many others to convene the first National Women’s Political Caucus to try to get more women into government.

That came not long before she co-founded the first national feminist publication, Ms. magazine. That decision, as Rebecca Traister details in New York magazine (at which Steinem had also been a founding editor), did not come without pushback. Soon after Ms. opened, a pornographer put up a display outside the magazine’s offices showing a cartoon of Steinem’s face attached to a very hairy body, surrounded by disembodied dicks.

“It has my face and head!” she wailed to her close friend, the feminist and New York congresswoman Bella Abzug, trying to explain why it bothered her so much. “And my labia,” Abzug had replied, silencing Steinem’s dismay with laughter.

She never slowed down — okay, she slowed down at 90, I guess, though she still kept her home as a meeting place for activists, talking circles, and occasional crash pad — and never stopped campaigning for equal rights for women, even when she was criticized for going too far, or not far enough.

Steinem loved young women: She listened to them and learned from them, growing and changing and hugging like an ‘80s sitcom. Traister’s piece above details a few cringey white-woman-centered things she wrote during Obama v. Clinton, though she’d also always learned from Black women back to the beginning of her consciousness-raising (she had first realized her life had been “terribly monochromatic” and learned “to value racial diversity” in the ‘50s in India)— but instead of being defensive about Getting It Wrong, she listened to young people and got better. And then oh, how that long, deep piece ends with a gut punch.

She also loved men. Apparently Third Wave feminists didn’t invent sex positivity after all; she would wear miniskirts and a button that read “CUNT POWER.” When she married David Bale, a South African-born activist who died of brain lymphoma a few years later, she said he wasn’t the love of her life — that all her relationships had been love and chosen family.

We know a little about love and chosen family — and hope, Gloria Steinem’s superpower — around these parts. We can only hope to do it as well.

[Gloria Steinem at New Yorker / Rebecca Traister at New York]