Gloria Steinem, the journalist and activist who became perhaps the most recognizable face of American feminism, has died at the age of 92 after spending more than half a century campaigning for women’s rights.
Steinem died Wednesday, September 2, at her home in New York City, according to her foundation, leaving behind a legacy that included groundbreaking journalism, abortion-rights activism, Ms. magazine and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Long before she became an icon of the women’s movement, however, Steinem participated in a considerably less celebrated political operation. She knowingly collaborated with an organization secretly financed by the CIA.
Beginning in 1959, Steinem headed the Independent Research Service, an organization established to encourage young Americans to attend Soviet-backed World Youth Festivals and challenge Communist influence among international students.
The group participated in festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962, presenting a liberal but explicitly anti-Communist American alternative to the Soviet message being promoted at the gatherings.
What most of the young Americans taking part apparently did not know was that much of the money supporting the operation secretly came from the CIA. Steinem did.
When the relationship became public in 1967 amid broader revelations about CIA financing of ostensibly private organizations, Steinem acknowledged that the agency had been a major source of funding for the operation she helped lead.
Rather than claiming she had been deceived, Steinem defended the arrangement. She argued that CIA support had allowed liberal Americans, rather than leaving the field solely to conservatives, to challenge Soviet propaganda overseas.
There is no evidence that Steinem was a conventional spy gathering secret intelligence, but he own words acknowledged that she knowingly participated in a CIA-financed Cold War political influence operation.
That history became considerably more controversial after Steinem emerged as one of the most prominent leaders of the American women’s movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
The radical feminist group Redstockings attacked her CIA involvement, arguing that cooperation with an intelligence agency associated with operations against revolutionary movements abroad was fundamentally incompatible with radical feminism.
Its members also questioned Steinem’s extraordinary prominence within the movement and demanded a fuller accounting of the relationship between her earlier political work and the agency.
The criticism was not confined entirely to feminism’s radical fringe. Former Ms. contributor Ellen Willis disagreed with some of Redstockings’ methods and conclusions but nevertheless argued that Steinem’s CIA history raised legitimate questions.
Willis particularly criticized Steinem for failing to repudiate her earlier cooperation, turning an episode that predated her feminist fame into an uncomfortable argument within the movement itself.
Other critics went much further, suggesting Steinem’s later activism or even Ms. magazine might somehow have remained connected to American intelligence. Evidence establishing those broader claims, however, has never emerged.
Steinem nevertheless went on to become one of the defining figures of second-wave feminism, co-founding Ms. and the National Women’s Political Caucus while campaigning for reproductive rights and equality.
Her influence eventually reached the highest levels of American political culture, with President Barack Obama awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Those achievements explain why tributes following her death have overwhelmingly remembered Steinem as a feminist pioneer, journalist and activist who helped transform the place of women in American public life.
Her CIA collaboration does not erase that legacy, but neither should her later fame erase the collaboration. Both belong to the historical record of a woman whose political life stretched across some of the most consequential social movements of the 20th century.
The documented history is perhaps more remarkable than some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Steinem suggest. She was not proven to be a CIA spy, but she knowingly helped operate a CIA-financed political project during one of the most intense periods of the Cold War.
As America remembers Gloria Steinem, that uncomfortable chapter belongs alongside the activism, journalism and feminism that made her an icon.