Agent of Feminism

Political movements are always defining their boundaries. When someone who acts in the name of an emancipatory struggle does something questionable or even reactionary, a typical response is: Well, they must not be a proper member of our movement, because no real comrade would have done that. There’s nothing wrong with this position, at least at the level of argument. It is typically an attempt to define what the movement should be, how its members should ideally conduct themselves, rather than what it is or has been.

Obituaries of Gloria Steinem, who died earlier this month, can for the most part be divided into two opposite camps. Steinem is seen either as iconic and emblematic feminist, or as the opposite: a false feminist who reflected what are taken to be limitations of the Second Wave, and who may have even betrayed the movement at the behest of the CIA.

Feminism is not an organisation with a membership card. Anyone can claim to be a feminist, though others might disagree. The question is what to do when this disagreement emerges — when we are confronted with those things that would make someone by our (anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and so on standards) not meaningfully a feminist. The feminist theorist Sophie Lewis has an answer to this: such people are not not part of the movement, but they are best understood as representatives of ‘enemy feminisms’. They remain ‘feminist’ in the sense of contesting patriarchal constraints, though their politics are not ours.

Gloria Steinem’s name is synonymous with feminism in the US. She was thirty-five — young, but not so young — in the late 1960s, when ‘trust nobody over thirty’ was a popular catchphrase and feminism was an emergent mass movement, part of which had broken off from a huge national mobilisation of mostly young people against a segregationist racial order at home and imperial violence maintained by an overlapping racial order abroad. These movements had made it impossible for things to carry on in the same way.

In 1969, Steinem attended a public abortion ‘speak-out’ on the streets of New York, and, having had an abortion herself in her early twenties, was particularly moved by the collective sharing of experiences that had hitherto been understood as private. Speak-outs formed part of an arsenal of new feminist tactics which sought to politicise women’s experience, advance a theoretical understanding of their oppression and bring them into collective struggle. Women would regularly gather in these public forums and in smaller consciousness-raising groups for lively, intense, serious discussions, often a site of productive disagreements.

Steinem quickly gained a role in the movement that involved popularising feminism among much wider layers of the public, particularly through Ms magazine, which she co-founded in 1972. One of the major dividing lines of that moment was the extent to which women, seeking liberation as women, should work with or in other organisations or strike out alone. Fed up with persistent chauvinism in male-dominated political groups, many had decided it was easier to form their own. Steinem noted that the same women who had been ‘jailed, beaten and Maced side-by-side with their social-activist male counterparts’ would be relegated to ‘typing and making coffee’ within the structures of Students for a Democratic Society.

The rationale for acting autonomously was partly pragmatic: it’s hard to get things done if you’re constantly making the coffee, and what you might want done will now likely have expanded to include overcoming the fact that you’re the person making the coffee. But it was also a political commitment: some feminists — calling themselves radical feminists — saw women’s liberation as a goal that could not be advanced through existing political institutions.

While radical feminists differed on many points, they tended to agree on the following: women’s oppression, which they took to mean men’s direct power over women — exerted particularly through sexuality — is the most important, most structuring, most fundamental power relation. On this view, liberation will come only from women organising autonomously. And because their oppression was believed to predate and form the basis of all other social oppressions, their freedom would result in a larger transformation of society itself.

In one sense Steinem was a liberal who believed in convincing, lobbying and legislating within existing institutions, making particular use of the media to raise issues like abortion, bias against women in the public sphere, equal pay and political representation. Steinem’s solutions to patriarchy were different sex roles and family norms, plus a meritocratic labour market. As Lewis puts it in an incisive obituary, Steinem’s anti-communist strand of feminism had ‘just enough radical credibility’ to divert the energy of social movements towards ‘peaceful electoralisms’.

Yet in another, important sense, Steinem was a radical feminist and saw herself as such, popularising a version of liberalised radical feminism whose diagnoses were radical even if its tactics were not. She saw confronting patriarchy as a collective project (albeit not a revolutionary one) rather than something women could achieve individually. She eschewed the radical-feminist ambition to overturn the entire system while adopting its premise that women are a class oppressed by another class, men, especially through sexuality, and that this oppression was the primary social relation.

Retrospectives on the so-called ‘Second Wave’ are often strangely ahistorical. The typical view is that the feminist movements of the late 1960s to 1980s were insufficiently inclusive, insufficiently attentive to questions of race and class, and that they ultimately failed as a result. Critics tend to think that we can now do things differently with the benefit of hindsight. But the trouble is that feminism was never a unitary movement, especially not over quite so many years, and such criticisms were often made by dissenting feminist currents at the time. (Steinem was in some ways ‘better’ than the standard view of the Second Wave; for her, social and racial equality objectives related to the women’s struggle, and she at least partly recanted her earlier transphobia.)

If there was an overarching problem with the Second Wave, and indeed with the radical feminism that dominated the feminist political landscape particularly in the US, it was that it underdetermined feminist politics. Belief in the primacy of male dominance, its greater salience relative to other relationships of power, is compatible with all kinds of politics, from across the ideological spectrum.

Radical feminists were right to claim that transcending women’s subordination relies on their empowerment. But what tactics make that possible, especially when women (and men) are less united than early slogans like ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’ would suggest? In the revolutionary moment of radical feminism’s formation, the idea was for the autonomous women’s movement to support a general attack on the system, which was seen as verging on collapse. But outside that moment, how should women direct their consciousness of men’s power over them? What does an insurrectionary politics to end women’s subordination look like in practice?

Should you take a legal strategy by overturning laws that disempower women? Or punishing actions that oppress women? Engage in separatism? Attack the symbols of women’s oppression (though how to be sure of what those are)? Overcome sexist problems in public services by coming up with a parallel system of healthcare services or support for women escaping abuse? A broad range of tactics has been used to advance radical feminist goals, many of which are not radical in the sense in which it is generally used — working with the police, creating new laws, becoming embedded in the political establishment through advocacy and charity work. These can and have often ended up with an easy accommodation with the political status quo or even alliances with the political right.

Steinem’s less-than-virtuous associations are well-known, and have often been emphasised by critics on her left. In the late 1950s and early 60s she worked for a CIA-funded research organisation which sent delegations of young Americans to attend the ‘World Festival of Youth and Students’, an event that brought people from socialist, capitalist and Third World countries together in the inhospitable conditions of the Cold War. Her role, according to the Redstockings group of New York feminists, seems to have involved propagandising and allegedly reporting back on attendees.

Steinem’s was a liberal variant of radical feminism, and her views on imperialism were those of the classic American liberal. She was critical of the war on Vietnam and the first Gulf War — seen as blips or excesses of US foreign policy — but she was a lifelong apologist for Zionism who refused to speak out on the genocide in Gaza and in later life committed herself wholeheartedly to the Democratic Party as the agent of progress. Yet to claim that Steinem’s liberal, radical, anti-communist feminism was a product of the CIA would be to ignore fertile soil in which it germinated. The Agency didn’t ‘need’ Steinem to domesticate feminism, nor did she need it to divert revolutionary energies to more reformist ends. The defeat of the feminist project was not just a story of infiltration and betrayal, but of the struggle between its more and less emancipatory tendencies, forced to coexist within the same movement, and even within the same thinkers.

There’s a dynamic here that goes much further than Steinem herself. Feminism, especially feminism that sees its ideal as not that different from the existing world, suffers from a tension between liberation as a collective goal and liberation as an individual state of being. Liberation is both a collective, political goal to be won and an individual state — one can be (relatively) free even before the achievement of that goal. Because there can be a degree of flexibility in expectations of what it means to be a man or woman — as we have seen from the significant shifts in the sixty or so years since the start of the Second Wave — feminism can produce both revolutionary horizons and aspirational totems. Neither is a ‘betrayal’ of the movement; both are reflections of this inherent contradiction.

One might say that the attachment to Steinem as a figurehead of the movement is an index of its unhappy fortunes over the past half-century. If feminism can no longer hope to achieve freedom writ large, then it needs individuals who appear to embody freedom, in however limited a form. If universal liberation is elusive, then the personal escape from oppression — however rare or fleeting — is the next best thing.

A problem with individual feminist change is that it can assume all kinds of different forms depending on what any individual takes ‘liberation’ to mean. Without the presence of political movements or collective, political possibilities, reactionary, non-liberatory accounts of liberation (the Girlboss of the 2010s; the lady War Hawk; ‘choice feminism’) are likely to proliferate, with stupefying and anti-solidaristic effects.

Yet, even so, it remains unhelpful to deny the irreducibly interpersonal aspects of feminism, or to write off the adulation for Steinem as nothing more than a liberal excesses or celebrity fetish. Feminism is, on such a view, is only about collective goals, politics with a capital ‘P’. But the fact is that participation in movements, and engagement with their ideas and figureheads, can change people in different, more subjective ways: not only in the big sweep of history, but in their ordinary lives.

Today, some of Steinem’s views might look conflicting or incompatible: she opposed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam but aligned herself with the Clinton wing of the Democrats; she professed anti-racism but refused to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians; she demanded better protections for workers but opposed the communist movement that fought for them. Yet these tensions reflect the limits of American liberalism itself, which permits dissent from the established order but only up to a point. Of course, few people are really coherent in their beliefs. And those who are tend to be quite strange. But some inconsistencies are symptomatic rather than singular. Steinem’s speak to the vexed politics of the Second Wave: a site of struggle and contestation in which there were, at least across the course of a lifetime, or the entire spread of a movement, very few coherent or non-contested positions.

The impulse to reduce this to a charge of ‘betrayal’ is driven by an understandable aim to define a movement’s boundaries: what is and is not acceptable within it. But while this might be a useful exercise in ideological discipline, it rarely maps onto the political or historical reality of social movements, whose defeats might teach us something if we looked at them more clearly.