The outpouring of tributes to Gloria Steinem, who passed away in New York on 2 September at 92—“surrounded by many who loved her,” as her foundation put it—has been remarkable, to put it mildly.
While an impromptu memorial of flowers, handwritten cards and messages written in chalk adorn the pavement outside her Manhattan apartment, there has been a torrent of fond remembrances on social media, and many emotional eulogies from a wide range of famous people in the media. Media across the world, including India, carried prominently placed obituaries; some well-known magazines republished earlier covers and interviews featuring her. The New Yorker published what it described as “Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay” the day after she died.
There has also been a sudden, somewhat startling, spate of denunciations from various quarters. This reminded me of the astonishing public furore over her decision in 2000 to get married (in a private civil ceremony drawn from Native American Cherokee traditions). In an article for the erstwhile Women’s Feature Service headlined Glorious Betrayal?, I had written then about the righteous indignation of many unrelated people over an individual’s personal decision.
The most sensational of the recent indictments, which have expectedly gone viral, promote an old allegation that she was a stooge of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Several credible individuals, including progressive academics and writers, have debunked these half-truths in considerable detail.
They have pointed out that her involvement in a CIA-funded youth movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially her work for a few years with the Independent Research Service (IRS), need to be seen in the context of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. They have also noted that such associations were neither uncommon nor widely viewed as problematic in those days; the CIA then actively promoted American culture and values across the world, partly as a counter to Soviet cultural diplomacy.
After the connection became public in 1967 through an essay on the National Student Association (NSA) and the CIA in Ramparts magazine, Steinem herself consistently maintained that she had never reported to the CIA and that no one in the agency had ever told her what to do or say.
Some detractors have also claimed that her version of feminism ignored class and race. This assertion, too, has been countered by several workers and persons of colour. Her first openly feminist essay back in 1969 was titled, After Black Power, Women’s Liberation. The headline of a recent article in Ebony, a African-American magazine, For Gloria Steinem, some of her biggest lessons came from Black women, echoed her frequent acknowledgement of Black women’s contributions to her own understanding of women’s issues and to the feminist movement. The piece mentions several Black women who influenced Steinem over the decades.
In a recent National Public Radio (NPR) interview, well-known activist and writer Angela Davis acknowledged the support extended to her by Steinem during the period she was in prison in the early 1970s. Steinem served as the national treasurer of the Angela Davis Defense Fund and helped to raise money for the case. She also recalled “Gloria’s solidarity with what we used to call women of color feminism.” A tribute on the United Farm Workers website highlighted Steinem’s “dedication and central roles in publicising boycotts, marches and strikes during the 1960s and the decades that followed.” A 1995 biography titled The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem refers to her support to sugarcane field and mill workers in Louisiana fighting for better wages, safer working conditions and basic labour rights in the early 1980s.
There is no doubt that some of her decisions and positions drew legitimate, understandable criticism from fellow feminists and progressives. Her support of Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate for President in 2008 was one such controversial stand. Of course, she subsequently supported Obama during the Presidential elections in both 2008 and 2012. However, she again supported Clinton against Trump in 2016 (in hindsight, though, that may not have been the worst choice!). More recently, Steinem was a supporter of the historic Senate candidacy of Peggy Flanagan, a Native American who is currently the lieutenant governor of Minnesota and may well win the election in November.
Another controversy arose over her surprising, seemingly sexist comment during a television show in 2016, apparently belittling young feminists for supporting Bernie Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic primary. In an obituary in The Nation, poet and essayist Katha Pollitt shared an email exchange with Steinem at the time that clarified what led to the unfortunate comment. Pollitt’s observation: “Don’t go on Bill Maher is the moral of that story.”
Her apparent silence on the genocide in Gaza and other crimes committed by the Israeli government over the years is clearly a major Achilles heel. A profile of her in an Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women, written by her Ms. Magazine colleague and friend, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, makes no mention of her political views on the Israeli state.
‘Not everyone's cup of tea’
In India, Steinem came under considerable fire for her stated position on “prostitution”, which was strongly refuted by several Indian feminists. In an April 2012 article in The Hindu, academic Sohini Ghosh wrote: “Gloria Steinem’s ‘feminist approach’ to trafficking and prostitution is not shared by all feminists. Many of us do not believe that abolishing sex work will stop trafficking, nor do we think that the two are synonymous. The conflation of sex-work with ‘trafficking’ stems from the moralistic assumption that women can never voluntarily choose sex work as a profession and are always ‘trafficked’ into it.” Steinem’s response, headlined “Body Invasion is De-humanising”, was also published by the paper.
In 2014, HuffPost published US-based academic Svati Shah’s critique of a series of articles by Steinem on the subject in The New York Times’ India Ink column: “Gloria Steinem vs. Prostitution in India.”
As writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit has observed, “She was not everyone’s cup of tea, and the women’s movement was never one movement controlled by one group with one set of ideas. It can be imagined as a laboratory (or many laboratories) of possibilities in which various theses, formulas, and solutions were tried, refined, rejected, improved, replaced and so on, which is to say it is ahistorical, among other things, to complain that, say, the feminists of 1972 were not the feminists of 2026. They were not but they opened doors for the feminists of 2026 and made the lives of countless women more safe, free, dignified, and possible.”
In a recent Facebook post, socialist-feminist scholar Zillah Eisenstein wrote of the time she and Steinem spoke at a conference titled “What do women want?” during Jimmy Carter’s presidency: “We differed… But she was amazingly open to the difference...she was always ready to work across difference…” To me this seems an admirable—and rare—quality.
It is perhaps not widely known that the glamorous celebrity of the past several decades had a fairly deprived childhood in Toledo, Ohio. Her parents got divorced when she was 10, and she was for some time the sole caretaker for her mentally ill mother, unable to go to school full-time until she was 12 years old. Steinem later attended Smith College in Massachusetts and graduated with distinction in 1956. She got a Chester Bowles Fellowship, which enabled her to spend two years in the late 1950s studying, researching and travelling in India.
She has spoken and written a lot over the years about what was clearly a life-changing experience. She often credited India with having taught her the organising methods that would later underpin her feminist activism. After her death, several Indian publications carried articles about that formative period, some even reproducing an old sari advertisement featuring her as the model.
Back in the US, she began her professional career as a journalist in New York, writing freelance pieces for various publications. It was tough going at a time when men ran newsrooms and women were largely relegated to secretarial and behind-the-scenes research roles. Like many women journalists across the world in those days—and even now—Steinem’s early articles were primarily lifestyle features; even though she studied government in college, she found it almost impossible to persuade editors to let her write political stories.
What finally garnered national attention was her 1963 expose in Show magazine based on undercover work at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club. The piece, A Bunny’s Tale, laid bare the deplorable working conditions of underpaid female wait staff in the elite club. In 1968, she helped found New York magazine, where she became an editor and political writer. A 1969 event at which women spoke out about abortion proved to be life-changing, sparking her engagement with feminism and the movement.
After a demonstration by feminist activists in 1970, calling out the limited, stereotypical content of women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal, Steinem and a few fellow journalists decided to establish a different kind of magazine for women. Ms. Magazine debuted in December 1971 as an insert in New York magazine.
Its first standalone edition, with a print run of 300,000 copies, was dated “Spring 1972” so that it would be able to remain on news-stands for months without looking out of date. It sold out in just eight days, generating 26,000 subscription orders. Steinem remained an editor and writer for the magazine for the next 15 years and maintained a close association with Ms. throughout the remainder of her life.
Ms. is where my association with Gloria Steinem began. I first met her in 1976 in the magazine’s then small, crowded office in New York while I was at Syracuse University. I spent about a week there, interviewing everyone possible, including Steinem and fellow founders of the magazine, for a term paper on the then relatively new publication.
A workable new solution
I will never forget one thing Steinem told me, which had a profound effect on me: “The hierarchal form doesn’t work any more at home or in the office. We have tried to find a workable new solution that reflects the opinion of the majority.” That encounter and experience inspired and motivated me to initiate major changes in the erstwhile women’s magazine, Eve’s Weekly, when I got back to India and Bombay in 1977.
Subsequently, we have met a few times, both in New York and in India. I have, of course, interviewed and written about her a few times over the years. She was the keynote speaker at the 5th national meeting of the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) in Bengaluru in 2007 but also attended some sessions, including one on community media, with rural women talking about their work with their own magazine, radio and video initiatives. I was particularly struck by how easily she interacted with the women afterwards despite the language barrier.
During the same visit she also participated in and spoke at a gathering of South Asian women writers in Delhi, discussing gender and censorship as part of a project I was involved in at the time. Her thought-provoking talk during the meeting, titled “Secret Censors, Public Solutions”, ended with these memorable words: “...if we consider censorship as any rendering of an individual or a group invisible, we will arrive at a far more expansive understanding of the term, and the phenomenon.”
Her death, inevitable as it is and blessed as it appears to have been, feels very much like a personal loss to me. She will, of course, live on through her words.
Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bengaluru.