Washington (United States) (AFP) – American journalist, activist and feminist icon Gloria Steinem has died, her foundation said on Thursday. She was 92.
"Yesterday, Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her," Gloria's Foundation said in a statement posted on Instagram. It did specify the cause of death.
Before becoming a leading figure in the women's rights movement, Steinem cut her teeth in journalism in the 1960s, denouncing the inequalities women endured at a time when many in the US still needed their husband's approval to open a bank account.
She came to prominence in 1963 with an expose of the pervasive sexism faced by cocktail waitresses at New York's Playboy Club.
But she credited her awakening to feminist activism in 1969, at a meeting where women described the ordeal of having an abortion.
"It made some sense of my own experience. I had had an abortion and had never told anyone," she later recounted in an article in New York Magazine.
The London doctor who gave her an abortion in 1957, when it was still illegal, made her promise two things: "First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life."
After this point, Steinem moved from writing to public speaking.
She spent decades travelling the United States and the world, attending conferences and protests.
In the 1970s, she founded Ms Magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus, and organized the first National Women's Conference in Houston.
At first, she lacked self-confidence and was terrified of public speaking.
"I knew what I wanted to do but I was a little worried about approval, especially when there was no (women's) movement in my life," she confided to AFP in 2019.
If she had done it all again, she would have "done lots of things differently," she added.
"We just need to be whoever the fuck we are and just do it."
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5 Comments
DagwoodIII@piefed.social · 7 pts · 23h
https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy
I liked her for a long time. Just found out that she was a CIA agent back in the day.
Worked to keep feminism from becoming radicalized.
obelisk_complex@piefed.ca · 6 pts · 23h
This was posted in another thread, I'll just leave it here: https://archive.org/details/redstockings-on-gloria-steinem-and-the-cia_202404/mode/1up
Edit: yeah, I can say it more plainly. Gloria Steinem was a CIA plant who gladly worked to deradicalise women in order to defang the feminist movement from the inside.Edit edit: Okay okay. She did explain her involvement with the Independent Research Service, but while Ms. Magazine absolutely put the issues of white women front and centre it largely ignored the concerns of minority women, and in the quest to broaden the appeal of feminism they did away with a lot of the structural change demands of the "second wave" of feminism in the US. As a result, a lot of the changes they won got made for a narrow slice of women, and only within the very structures that needed to be dismantled. Maybe it's a stretch to say this was a psyop by the CIA or that she was a plant. Ms. did raise a number of talking points that went against the interests of the government, at the time, and it did do a lot to advance feminism generally. Was the blunting of the movement's goals deliberate, or a side effect of trying to broaden the appeal of the movement to gain more adherents from the masses?
velma@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 19h
Being part of a group that received funds from the CIA is different than being a CIA plant, but ok. Steinem didn't deny her involvement either.
obelisk_complex@piefed.ca · 2 pts · 8m
Fair point, and it's not like she never plausibly explained her involvement. Ms is along the lines of what I'd do if I wanted to contain a revolution by shaping it, but it's also true that the decisions made in what issues to highlight and how to present solutions would have been made as part of a "mass appeal" drive too. And I can't even say that activists can't be co-opted by the forces they're fighting; these are different approaches to the same goal, both valid. As is shown by the impact Ms did have I think, which is not to be understated - no question they advanced some aspects of the movement.
velma@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 5m
Yeah that's mostly how I feel about her and the impact she made on the movement shouldn't be ignored. There's a lot of nuance in there.
ATS1312@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 10h