The death last week of Gloria Steinem at the age of 92 saw many tributes to someone who was widely viewed as a feminist icon. She was outspoken, photogenic, instantly recognizable with her long hair and aviator glasses, and had the knack of saying things that captured attention. She was much sought after by the mainstream media whenever they were looking for someone to provide a feminist viewpoint, especially after she founded the pioneering Ms. magazine.

But Jenny Brown argues that there was another Gloria Steinem who was no feminist trailblazer but someone who actually betrayed the radical roots of the feminist movement by taking it in a neoliberal direction, which was why she became a favorite of the political establishment and the mainstream media, sucking attention way from the more radical feminists who came before her. Her dominance tended to obliterate the major role that many other feminists played in laying the groundwork for the advances. Her focus on individual liberation also undermined the collective liberation that more radical feminists felt was necessary for full emancipation.

Gloria Steinem died this week at age 92. The establishment’s favorite “radical” feminist, Steinem worked with the CIA to promote reactionary propaganda and helped direct the women’s liberation movement into a corporate-friendly, anti-socialist direction.
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For many people, she is the only radical feminist they can name, eclipsing the extraordinary women who planned and launched the successful women’s liberation movement starting in 1967.
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Yet the women who had taught her so much largely failed to find a place in the pages of Ms. three years later. Ellen Willis, pop music critic for The New Yorker and a Redstockings founder, did manage to make the cut starting in 1973. She resigned after two years, calling Ms. editorial policy “conservative, anti-left feminism.” In her resignation letter, Willis wrote: “No attempt has ever been made to recruit and hire experienced feminist writers, theorists, organizers. . . .  Ms.’s politics [include] a mushy, sentimental idea of sisterhood designed to obscure political conflicts between women.”
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Before the rise of Ms., movement originators had received widespread coverage. Kate Millett was on the cover of Time in 1970. That same year hundreds of feminists occupied the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal editor John Mack Carter, demanding an issue they edited (and free daycare for the magazine’s workforce). They won an eight-page supplement titled “The New Feminism.”

But soon, the media went to Steinem for their “radical” feminism. Redstockings called it the “historic invisibility treatment”: The women who developed the movement’s strategy were written out of the picture. They became anonymous foremothers — while many were still in their twenties and thirties.
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Steinem’s concept of a “liberated woman” (who, as she quipped, has sex before marriage and a job after) directly contradicted the the very heart of the radical movement’s argument — that women are oppressed as a class and can’t make themselves free individually.

Where did her politics come from? She seemed have one foot in the establishment from the start, dating John F. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen; then Franklin Thomas, who would soon lead the Ford Foundation; and, in the 1980s, real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman. Vivian Gornick recalled, “Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with Establishment figures; we had only ourselves.”
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In 1967, the left-wing magazine Ramparts exposed the river of secret CIA money flowing into the National Student Association, the United States’ largest student group. After the revelations, Steinem spoke to the press about her role in recruiting anti-communist students to attend and disrupt the World Youth Festivals, which started in the socialist world and planned for the first time to venture outside the iron curtain in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962.

She worked full-time as director of the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, later renamed the Independent Research Service (IRS), a CIA conduit that flooded the festivals with anti-communist and pro-US propaganda.
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In recent years, Steinem dropped all pretense of radicalism. She supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders, and in an interview that year on Real Time With Bill Maher suggested that young women only supported Sanders because “that’s where the boys are; the boys are with Bernie.” She later claimed she misspoke.
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Women’s liberation movement pioneers, to a woman, came out of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the student left. They believed that consistent feminism leads to socialism, and vice versa. Following Beauvoir, they wanted to dig deep and abolish the exploitation of women and the oppression required to maintain it. Starting in the 1960s, they planned and built a successful radical movement that profoundly changed the situation of women in the United States and reverberated worldwide.

It’s a crime that their movement was for fifty years personified by someone who never shared its goals.

Laura Flanders writes that Steinem’s dominance as a feminist spokesperson is a result of the media seeming to have a very limited quota for the number of people who can represent a movement, however diverse that movement may be that requires multiple voices to captures its complexity. While Steinem was an important voice, she was not the only, or even the major, one.

[Steinem’s] feminism was not my feminism. I came to the US from London at nineteen, in 1980. By the time I encountered Steinem, my feminism was already firmly set. Mine was informed by Angela Davis and Barbara Smith; by Sheila Rowbotham and Beatrix Campbell; by Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Audre Lorde, Zillah Eisenstein and Ellen Willis. The British magazine Spare Rib, founded the same year as Ms., was scrappier and further left.

I don’t know what to call my sort of feminism. At the time, I thought it was the only kind: anti-colonialist, anti-authoritarian, queer-desiring, in-your-face. It took me years to accept that liberal feminism, of Steinem’s sort, was actually a thing. A pink piece of the capitalist cake? A Cold War with a bow on it? I didn’t want either. I still don’t.
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Year after year, at FAIR [a media watchdog group-MS], we argued that the money media had room for only one feminist. A quota of one. For decades, Steinem filled it. Hers was the number they’d call whether the topic was fashion or kids or war and peace.
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Many people tried to widen it. Nearly two decades after the Women’s Institute, FAIR established the Women’s Desk in 1991 to counter white-male bias in news reporting. Jennifer Pozner continued that work through Women in Media and News,⁴ a decade later. In 2005, Steinem co-founded the Women’s Media Center, which, among other things, conducted valuable annual surveys of women’s exclusion from everything from news to TV sitcoms.

Try as we all might (and we were by no means the only ones) the money media’s gatekeepers kept – and still keep – all but their chosen few out of their picture of social justice work and its meaning. The policing works not only to keep us ill-informed and isolated. It often sets us at each other’s throats. Instead of hating the gate and its keepers, we hate the few – Gloria Steinem in this case – whose political positions and public personas are legible and acceptable enough to fit the media’s parameters.
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The media gatekeepers and their gates live on, but they are weaker today, besieged by a mass of individual media-makers on countless platforms where the debates over legacies like Steinem’s are being thrashed out minute by minute. As I look again, many of the social media posts calling for her cancellation are being contested by people tracking more closely the evolution of Steinem’s early, regressive positions on issues like trans rights. That’s progress.

Movements that seek to empower marginalized groups to seize the rights due to them are usually very wide and diverse, rarely speaking with one voice. Focusing on just one or a very few does those movements a disservice.