Steinem went to Smith College, where she was writing papers on the Communist Party of India and the like (cf. <http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss66.html>), in an age when Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was an international best seller (published in France in 1952, the first English translation published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1953). It would be a surprise if she hadn't been interested in gender equality and women's rights at all.
> Her quotes in the Washington Post in 1967 reflect that she wasn't really
> focusing on the movement, feminist or otherwise, or she would've been more
> circumspect. (The Ramparts exposé's of CIA funding were breaking, the article was a
> response to that.) Women's Liberation (as opposed to NOW) doesn't burst on
> the scene till 1968, and it is decidedly unfriendly to the CIA, being composed
> of civil rights workers and student movement/anti-war organizers.
<snip>
> Her role in the feminist movement is more direct and later, and has more to
> do with domestic than foreign distortions. As she said in 1967, "The CIA's big
> mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough." The goal
> was to _look_ independent and spontaneous.
If everyone in women's movements had been friendly to the CIA, there would have been no need to cultivate paid informers like Steinem. And of course, she, as well as her bosses, was concerned about the funding's implications for movements -- feminist, student, etc. -- hence the concern to look "independent and spontaneous."
Steinem claimed in a 1967 NYT article that "I was never asked to report on other Americans or assess foreign nationals I had met" (<http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/Gloria%20Steinem%20and%20CIA.htm>).
The denial of the former is suspicious, as the denial of the latter is plainly a lie.
> Second, the CIA could've gotten those affiliations and information in other
> ways, but you can't fairly argue that paying anti-communists to attend and
> report on the World Youth Festivals is not one of the ways they did so. Still,
> probably her most important role on behalf of the CIA was to provide an
> anti-communist propaganda machine at the Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki. In Vienna,
> this included recruiting and paying for anti-communist U.S. youth to attend,
> publishing 400,000 copies of a daily newspaper for the three weeks of the
> festival, and distributing 36,000 books by liberal anti-communists and socialists.
> Samuel Walker reported to C.D. Jackson, "Gloria's group continues to do
> yeoman service, distributing books etc. to the point where the cry has gone up
> 'Never before have so many Young Republicans distributed so much Socialist
> literature with such zeal.'" (The letter is quoted in Kai Bird's 1992 book on John
> J. McCloy, which also mentions that Steinem directly reported to C. D. Jackson
> "in great detail on the left-wing affiliations of various Americans associated
> with the allegedly Soviet-backed U.S. Festival Committee.")
I doubt that the barage of anti-communist literature, which wasn't as subtle as promoting abstract expressionism had a great impact on participanats in the festival themselves (many of whom were Communists) -- it's like distributing piles of anti-Chavez lit at the WSF in Venezuela last year.
If Steinem had been nobody, her action would have been of no consequence, but given her prominence in the US feminist movement, she has cast a shadow over it. And I'm sure she wasn't the only feminist who was employed in that capacity.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>