Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at age 92, and the mainstream press responded with wall-to-wall hagiography — the New York Times called her the personification of the women’s movement. Jenny Brown’s Jacobin essay reads against that grain: the woman canonized as the movement’s face spent her early career running a CIA conduit, launched Ms. magazine on a market the radicals had already created, and steered feminism toward individual self-improvement and corporate accommodation rather than class struggle.

What the piece lays out:

  • The radicals got there first — by 1971 women’s liberation had front-page magazine coverage, ten mass-market anthologies selling millions of copies, and a hundred small newspapers and journals. New York legalized abortion in 1970, and the ERA cleared Congress by early 1972, much of it before Steinem and Ms. arrived on the scene
  • Ms. launched inside New York magazine in December 1971 and standalone in July 1972, bankrolled by Katharine Graham and a deliberately generous Warner Communications ($1 million for a 25 percent stake). Ellen Willis joined in 1973 and quit within two years, calling the editorial policy “conservative, anti-left feminism”
  • The softening was real: Patricia Mainardi watched Ms. change her word “loved” to “had a fondness for”; Kathie Sarachild called it the women’s-magazine “change yourself” line dressed up to look radical
  • The CIA years: after Ramparts exposed CIA money inside the National Student Association in 1967, Steinem defended her full-time work directing the Independent Research Service, a CIA conduit that flooded socialist-sponsored World Youth Festivals with anti-communist propaganda. Redstockings’ 1975 exposé drew the parallel between Ms. displacing movement founders and CIA “parallel organization” tactics — and when Random House planned a mass-market edition of Feminist Revolution, Steinem threatened to sue and the publisher censored the chapter
  • The politics under the polish: individual liberation (the liberated woman has sex before marriage and a job after), then self-esteem as revolution in Revolution From Within (1992) — against the radicals’ class analysis: women oppressed as a class, consciousness-raising as collective investigation rather than therapy
  • The late-career tells: backing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016, dismissing young women Sanders supporters as “where the boys are”

Brown’s sharpest point is about personhood — who gets to stand in for a movement. The women who actually built women’s liberation came out of civil rights, the antiwar left, and the student movements, and believed consistent feminism led to socialism. Redstockings called what happened to them the “historic invisibility treatment”: written out of the story while still in their twenties and thirties, replaced by a figurehead who never shared their goals.

The essay is also an argument about why the mainstream keeps resurrecting that figurehead — from Clinton and Albright to Sandberg, a “1 percent feminism” that leaves exploitative corporations and a violent US empire untouched. Fifty years of media canonization, Brown concludes, made Steinem the personification of a movement she helped domesticate: “It’s a crime that their movement was for fifty years personified by someone who never shared its goals.”