Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Was An Anti-Communist CIA Operative who Kept Feminism From Discussing Class
Declassified Cold War Ties Show How U.S. Intelligence Shaped Feminism’s Focus On Gender Over Class.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union hosted a series of World Youth Festivals — mass international gatherings designed to export communist ideology to young activists worldwide.
The CIA responded by quietly funding American liberal organizations to send students abroad to counter Soviet messaging.
When Ramparts magazine exposed this program in 1967, it found the agency had secretly bankrolled dozens of American civil society groups — student organizations, labor unions, cultural institutions — under the banner of anti-communism.
Steinem’s CIA Work
After two years in India on a Chester Bowles fellowship, Steinem was recruited by CIA officers C.D. Jackson and Cord Meyer into this program. She founded and directed the Independent Research Service (IRS) — a front organization whose purpose was to send American students to the 1959 Vienna World Youth Festival and the 1962 Helsinki festival to counter Soviet influence.
The operation was funded almost entirely by the CIA: approximately $85,000 for Vienna alone. Steinem ran the organization from 1959 to 1962 and remained on its board as late as 1968–69.
When Ramparts broke the story in 1967, Steinem confirmed her role to The New York Times without apology, describing the CIA as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable” and stating she would do it again.
The Feminist Movement and the Class Problem
Steinem entered feminist organizing in 1969–70 with no prior record in any women’s group, no feminist publications, and no history of organizing working-class women.
Within two years, she was the most recognizable face of American feminism — co-founding Ms. magazine in 1972 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.
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The feminism she came to represent was explicitly focused on gender — equal access to institutions, reproductive rights, professional advancement — and explicitly avoided class as a framework.
The mainstream of second-wave feminism under Steinem’s influence was built around the concerns of white, college-educated, professional women. It did not center poverty wages, the absence of universal childcare, or the conditions of working-class and domestic labor — all of which disproportionately burdened poor women and women of color.
Socialist feminists and radical feminists of the same era — including the Redstockings, Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective, and figures like Barbara Ehrenreich — argued consistently that gender liberation without economic liberation was a half-measure that served elite women at the expense of everyone else.
That critique was largely excluded from the mainstream feminist conversation that Ms. and the NWPC represented.
The 1975 Redstockings Investigation
In May 1975, the Redstockings — a radical feminist collective founded by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone — published a detailed investigation into Steinem’s CIA ties and their implications for the movement.
They documented her IRS directorship, the CIA funding, and the network of relationships surrounding the launch of Ms. magazine — including the role of Clay Felker, who helped fund the magazine’s first issue and had himself worked as an editor on an IRS publication during the CIA-funded Vienna operation.
Redstockings argued that Ms. functioned as what the CIA termed a “parallel organization” — an institutional presence that channeled feminist energy into an acceptable liberal framework and away from the class-based and anti-capitalist currents that were equally alive in the movement at that time.
The investigation was widely circulated in feminist circles and prompted Steinem to write a six-page letter defending herself — but never to address the structural question directly: why did the most-platformed feminist publication in the country systematically avoid class?
Suppression of the Record
In 1979, The Village Voice reported that Random House had removed the Redstockings chapter documenting Steinem’s CIA history from their forthcoming book Feminist Revolution — following legal pressure connected to Steinem and figures in her network, including Katharine Graham and associates of Cord Meyer. The chapter was never published by Random House. Betty Friedan, herself a critic of the direction Steinem represented, publicly stated the questions deserved a full accounting.
The pattern — liberal feminist establishment uses legal and institutional leverage to suppress a working-class feminist critique — was a demonstration of the very dynamic Redstockings had identified.
What This Produced
The feminism that reached mainstream America through the 1970s and 1980s — the feminism of glass ceilings, professional representation, and individual advancement — was shaped decisively by Steinem’s network and platform. It produced real gains for professional women.
It also produced a movement that could be absorbed into corporate culture with minimal disruption: companies could hire women executives, run feminist ad campaigns, and face no structural challenge to the low wages, absent benefits, and exploitative conditions that defined the working lives of most women.
That outcome was the product of specific choices about what feminism would foreground and what it would leave out — choices made by people whose institutional formation was explicitly anti-socialist, and whose rise was funded, at its origins, by the agency most dedicated to containing the American left.
Sources: Gloria Steinem, New York Times (1967); Redstockings press release and research report (1975); The Village Voice (May 21, 1979); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (1999); Daniel Brandt, NameBase/Portland
https://medium.com/collapsenews/feminist-icon-gloria-steinem-was-an-anti-communist-cia-operative-who-kept-the-feminist-movement-b19a09fa66de
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:57
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