The obituaries have settled into their shape. Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, dead at ninety-two, a life well lived. Somewhere below the tributes, below the aviator glasses and the Ms. covers, a short paragraph appears. Yes, there was the matter of the CIA. But she addressed it head-on, the paragraph says, and besides, she called the Agency liberal and honorable. That paragraph’s doing quiet work. It’s built so the reader forgives and forgets in the same breath.
We’re not here to withhold or grant forgiveness. We’re here to read the ledger.
The facts aren’t in dispute, and they were never secret. From roughly 1959 to 1962, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, an operation funded almost entirely by the CIA, whose purpose was to send non-Communist American students to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki to blunt Soviet influence. The money moved through a chain of cutout foundations before it reached her. Ramparts exposed the arrangement in March 1967. Steinem didn’t deny it. She defended it, and said that if she had the choice she’d do it again. Take her at her word. The question that matters isn’t what was in her heart. The question is what the state was buying, and what it was destroying at the same time.
Because there’s a second column in this ledger, and the tributes never print it.
While the CIA was underwriting a liberal, gender-first, anti-Communist internationalism through people like Steinem, the same state was running COINTELPRO. That program operated from 1956 to 1971, and its Black nationalist directive, opened in 1967, named the goal plainly in Hoover’s own memos: prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify the movement. This wasn’t surveillance in the abstract. It was Fred Hampton dead on his mattress in December 1969 in a raid coordinated with the FBI. It was the systematic gutting of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. It was Assata Shakur driven into exile and Angela Davis put on trial for her life. Reach further back and the pattern holds. Claudia Jones, a Black Communist who in 1949 theorized the superexploitation of Black women, the triple burden of race and class and sex decades before the vocabulary caught up, was deported by that same state in 1955.
Set the two columns side by side. One feminism received laundered money and a soft landing in the popular memory. Another current, the one carrying the class analysis and the anti-imperial edge, received infiltrators, indictments, deportation orders, and bullets.
Both statements are literal. This is what we mean when we say the state has a revealed preference. You don’t need to prove that any single person engineered anything. You only need to read what was resourced and what was repressed.
This is where the hagiography’s favorite complaint collapses. Mainstream liberal feminism is often faulted, correctly, for abstracting gender away from class and race, for treating the boardroom ceiling as the frontier while the floor gave way underneath poor and colonized women. The usual explanation is intellectual immaturity, a movement that simply hadn’t yet learned to think in more than one variable. That’s a comforting story, and it’s false. The analysis existed the entire time. It was never missing from feminism. It was carried by the tradition the state was busy dismantling.
Claudia Jones named the interlocking structure in 1949. Frances Beal wrote Double Jeopardy in 1969 out of SNCC, and the Third World Women’s Alliance built organization around it. The National Black Feminist Organization formed in 1973. The Combahee River Collective, in 1977, stated it as flatly as it’s ever been stated, that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and that a politics adequate to Black women’s lives had to confront race and class and sex and sexuality at once. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the framework its legal name, intersectionality, in 1989. None of this was a late correction to feminism. It was feminism’s most rigorous line, developed in real time, by the women the funding never found.
So the class-blindness of the feminism that got the CIA’s money and the magazine covers isn’t an accident of the calendar. It’s downstream of a choice. The currents that insisted on class and empire were the currents the state spent a decade and a fortune trying to break. What remained, what could be safely elevated, was a feminism that named patriarchy but left the ownership question alone. The single-axis frame wasn’t the movement’s growing pain. It was, in part, the movement’s survivors, the ones permitted to survive.
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