Gloria Steinem, one of the most prominent figures of U.S. liberal feminism, died on September 2 at the age of 92. Mainstream obituaries have overwhelmingly celebrated her as a pioneer of the women’s movement. Far less attention has been given to another documented part of her political record: her collaboration with the CIA during the Cold War.
Before becoming a leading feminist figure, Steinem worked closely with CIA operatives through the Independent Research Service, a CIA-financed organization created to intervene in the World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962.
Steinem herself acknowledged that she worked extensively with CIA agents and helped organize American participation in these festivals, whose purpose was to counter communist and Soviet influence among young people internationally.
Her role was not an invention of political opponents. When the relationship became public in 1967, Steinem openly defended it, describing the CIA officials she worked with as “liberal and far-sighted.” She remained unapologetic about the collaboration for decades.
For communists, this episode is essential to any assessment of Steinem’s political legacy. She was not simply a feminist activist who happened to cross paths with U.S. intelligence. She participated directly in CIA-backed anti-communist activity aimed at influencing international youth politics, and later became one of the most influential representatives of a liberal feminism detached from class struggle and revolutionary politics.
That part of her record deserves to be remembered just as much as the carefully polished image now being reproduced in the bourgeois press.
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