Sure, and parts of it are, by comparison. That doesn't mean its activities are in our interests. 'Liberalism and reasonableness' could mark out an unfortunate description of the Democratic party right about now.
>You have to remember that women's rights, like racial equality, were
>regarded in part as a Communist issue, before becoming mainly regarded
>as an issue for autonomous organizing. Those like Steinem, paid
>informers planted in that nexus of milieux, were doubly useful.
You mean because she was female? I'm sure it gave her operation a more progressive veneer. I am aware that women's rights 'were regarded in part as a communist issue.' But really, you're wrong that she was using feminism at that time. She wasn't selling herself as a feminist until a decade later. Female, perhaps, but not a feminist.
>Generally speaking, a majority of American feminists -- aside from a
>small minority of left-wing feminists -- have not come to critically
>evaluate imperialists' uses of feminists and feminist issues. Steinem
>never got ostracized by the rest of American feminists because of her
>work for the CIA, which she does not appear to have regretted at all.
She mostly denied it and what she didn't deny she minimized. But the main damage she (and her funders) did was to water down women's liberation in the U.S., cutting off the radical originators from media and publishing access. That's what made it difficult to 'ostracize' her, she was the ostracizer-in-chief for feminism for a long time. Feminists who criticized her, not just for the CIA history, but for the feminism promoted in Ms., lost access. There *was* a lot of criticism of her in the U.S. women's liberation movement, it just never got amplified. Most women didn't hear enough about it to have a view on one side or another.
And it's not just ownership and access, she threatened to sue to suppress the information on two occasions I know about, and the threats were enough to stop publication of the material. So much for freedom of expression in the U.S.
Jenny Brown