Before Gloria Steinem became the most visible face of American feminism, she ran a CIA front. From 1958 to 1962, she founded and directed the Independent Research Service, an organization the Central Intelligence Agency funded almost entirely through Cord Meyer’s International Organizations Division. Her mandate: recruit American students to Soviet-sponsored World Youth Festivals in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962), distributing propaganda while collecting intelligence on foreign participants. The Agency’s own declassified CREST files document this infrastructure of covert student funding. Steinem knew the CIA bankrolled the operation; most of the students she recruited did not.
When Ramparts magazine exposed the Agency’s covert student programs in February 1967 — a revelation that prompted President Johnson to order the CIA to terminate all secret funding of private groups — Steinem confirmed her role to the New York Times and the Washington Post without apology. She called the CIA “liberal, nonviolent and honorable,” described its officers as “enlightened” Kennedy-era activists, and said she would do it all again. Internal CIA records from this period, including press clippings the Agency itself catalogued, trace how the fallout from the Ramparts exposé rippled across its network of student and cultural front organizations. Eight years later, the Redstockings published a sixteen-page investigation arguing that Ms. magazine functioned as what the CIA termed a “parallel organization”, channeling feminist energy away from class-based radicalism and toward the institutional liberalism the Agency had always preferred. Steinem’s lawyers blocked the Redstockings chapter from publication in book form; Random House pulled it from Feminist Revolution before the book went to press.
Her defense of the CIA as a force for liberal good has never truly reckoned with what the same apparatus did to other liberation movements. In 1967, the year Steinem praised Langley, the CIA launched Operation CHAOS, an illegal domestic surveillance program that infiltrated Black liberation anti-war, and women’s liberation organizations across the country., The FBI’s COINTELPRO, running in coordination with CIA intelligence, surveilled Black Panther free breakfast programs, fabricated internal conflicts between Black organizations, and helped orchestrate the 1969 assassination of twenty-one-year-old chairman Fred Hampton. That Steinem built a career on women’s liberation while defending the intelligence apparatus that actively suppressed Black liberation–and never substantially revised that defense–is a contradiction the mainstream feminist movement has largely declined to address. — Jill Damatac, Senior Editor
This part of Steinem’s–and the United States’–history matters because it should be known and shouldn’t be hagiographically erased in order to preserve a cleaner version of feminist history. That the CIA has had a role in giving a young activist like Gloria Steinem opportunities based on the fact that she represented women’s rights as an anti-communist was particularly interesting to the CIA and their agenda. But what do we do with everything that came after?
Do Steinem’s CIA ties invalidate her contributions to feminism? Do they change how we understand them? Can both histories exist at once? We have a tendency to put people engaged in liberation work on impossible pedestals. We turn human beings into symbols and expect ideological consistency across entire lifetimes. We are looking for Jesus and Mary to crucify anyway, and ignore their teachings. When the public discovers a contradiction (and there will always be contradictions), the pedestal collapses and the punishment begins. The internet can feel like a scene of Game of Thrones where the crowd shouts “shame, shame” while spitting on the culprit. In our space, scrutiny comes with the work. It could be working briefly for the CIA or engaging in other forms of money making that aren’t “clean”.
But perhaps the problem was the pedestal. None of us arrive at political consciousness fully formed. We are born inside the systems we eventually learn to question. We inherit colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, nationalism and other structures of power long before we develop the language to recognize them.
Political consciousness is a process. This does not mean abandoning accountability. Quite the opposite. We should interrogate Steinem’s relationship with the CIA. We should also interrogate the feminism she helped build: whom it centered, whom it excluded, what it transformed, and where it fell short. Steinem promoted a middle class, white version of feminism rather than one that radically critiques capitalism, a tradition carried on instead by feminists like Sylvia Federici, or, in the decades before, radicals like Rosa Luxemburg, who rejected organizing along ethnic lines. Though Steinem herself has, rightly, given credit to Black feminists such as Florence Kennedy, Frances Beal, and Dorothy Pitman Hughes who were her contemporaries, mentors, and from whom she has borrowed her work, the broader culture does not. Over time, her work continued to evolve to connect the dots between workers rights and abolition. She also extended her magazine platform to Black feminists—which wasn’t the case at the time for more mainstream feminist outlets.
A politics of liberation should be able to distinguish between accountability and annihilation. It should allow us to say: this was wrong. This caused harm. This deserves scrutiny. And also: a human life is larger than its worst contradiction. Otherwise, we risk reproducing the carceral logic we claim to oppose—only this time inside our own movements. Perhaps political maturity means resisting the desire for heroes and villains altogether.
Gloria Steinem does not need to be a saint for her contributions to feminism to matter. Nor do those contributions require us to sanitize her relationship with the CIA. We can hold both. In fact, perhaps we must. The work around liberation movements is messy, we need imperfect people—the opposite doesn’t exist. We need people capable of learning, accountability, repair and transformation. When learning about her journey, it felt immature–petty, even– to hold her brief CIA gig above everything else she continued to work on in her life. It isn’t lost on us that we tend to scrutinize women and hold their past as the main descriptor of everything else they do and achieve, far more so than men.
Still, here at Everything Is Political, one of our founding tenets is to constantly seek out and illuminate facts in order to move towards truths and, ultimately, with any luck, towards collective liberation. When cultural–and political–giants fall, it is difficult to not be pulled by the undertow of hagiography. The harder question, we find, isn’t simply what we think about Gloria Steinem or if we are able to celebrate her life. It’s what we believe about human beings. What is worth celebrating amidst controversy. Perhaps one of her greatest contributions towards collective liberation has been her lifelong growth and willingness to learn, evolve, and change.
— Celine Semaan, Editor-In-Chief