ArcaMax

PARIS — Gloria Steinem sent me a personal message not long ago thanking me for my “generous and encouraging” words that “make it worth getting older.” Not worth it enough, apparently. Because one of the most visible faces of American second-wave feminism has just passed away peacefully at her New York home on September 2, at the age of 92.

Somewhere out there, I know she’s laughing at that joke. My all-time favorite line of hers came when she was talking about the benefits of women’s collaborative communication style, while conceding that men’s communication style can also be useful on occasion — like when there’s a fire.

Since her passing, the reactions to Steinem and her fiery career have been rife with that male-style communication — on all political sides. That’s the ultimate proof of independence, and the biggest honor that you can give a political figure: the fact that people are still arguing with you even after you’re gone.

So what could a political analyst with a populist, right-leaning bent possibly have in common with Gloria Steinem? More than you might think.

Because before feminism became institutionalized, it was a revolt in favor of the idea that women should have the freedom to do “whatever the f*** they want” with their life, to quote Steinem herself. A fundamentally populist idea. The kind that now is primarily associated with the right.

Steinem’s political engagement began in her 20s after a two-year trip to India in the 1950s, where she was paid to write geopolitical and cultural commentary following Gandhi’s assassination. Now archived at Smith College, her alma mater, it’s some of the most impressive political analysis that I’ve ever seen.

“I came home in 1958 full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done,” she told the New York Times in 1967. “Students were not taken seriously here before the civil rights movement, and private money receded at the mention of a Communist youth festival.”

No kidding.

Turns out the CIA, through Steinem, helped establish a funding structure that allowed hundreds of American students to exchange ideas about social change in Cold War Europe — and, according to accounts of the program, to provide information about Soviet activity at these festivals.

Apparently, even the CIA was willing to regard liberalization as an acceptable off-ramp on the road to radical communism, and Steinem played a documented role in that roadblock.

She briefly backed the Vietnam War in 1967 before turning against it and actively protesting it — much in the same way that many Americans today have soured on U.S. military interventions since September 11, 2001, despite once backing them. Guess she dropped her crystal ball.

Seeking mainstream platforms for her political writing, she found it difficult to get published as a woman writing about politics, unless she could find a way to feminize the subject, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. In a 1974 interview, Steinem recalled that she initially didn’t think that feminism applied to her because she wasn’t a homemaker living in the suburbs. She was an unmarried working woman with no kids, living in the city. Then she encountered what she described as an institutional “caste system” that applied to her too, particularly as a woman.

And this is where I part ways with the contemporary left and right in our respective assessments of Steinem’s legacy.

Critics on the left argue that she ultimately prevented feminism from becoming more radical. More radical than what? Your dudes showing up to race at women's swim meets? Looks like she didn't get in the way of that. If she had, she would have been excommunicated by her movement's self-appointed intersectionalist successors. And don't think she didn't know it.

When a radical movement succeeds, the things they fought for tend to seem a lot less radical at some point. Women working, going to university, having their own bank accounts, choosing whether to marry or have children, renting an apartment by themselves without being subjected to the charming assumption that they’re prostitutes. These weren’t Steinem’s inventions. Women had already demonstrated during World War II that they could contribute far beyond the roles conventionally assigned to them. Steinem didn’t create that transformation, but she did become one of its most recognizable faces.

And she was successful enough in promoting it that much of what was once considered radical eventually became institutionalized. The public opinion that Steinem helped shape gave institutions the cover to normalize some of those changes.

Critics on the left also say that Steinem didn’t do enough for blue-collar workers, despite her success advocating for farm workers and female factory workers seeking equal pay. They accuse her of hijacking the civil rights conversation by shifting attention from race toward gender. Because apparently women were supposed to sit quietly and wait to be called upon like at the local deli.

The right has long held her responsible for destroying the family unit. Really? How, exactly? By promoting greater equality between the people inside it? By normalizing the idea that women should have agency? A family in which one person has no meaningful autonomy is the ideal? It’s certainly not democratic.

The recent HBO documentary about the women’s issue magazine that Steinem co-founded in 1972, “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print,” showed her describing feminism back then as a populist movement.

She was onto something.

Populism is just the radical proposition that ordinary people should have meaningful power over their own lives. The notion is at the heart of an important strand of conservatism: the defense of the individual — the very smallest and most vulnerable minority unit — against infringements on their freedom.

A woman who can make meaningful choices has more control over her own existence. But Steinem’s movement was ultimately tamed by the same institutions that helped platform and fund it to mainstream success.

Steinem never arrived at the fully anti-establishment freedom-first destination idealized by some of us women. She spent her career arguing that women should have more control over their own lives. Given that's no longer considered radical, she clearly succeeded. But she became too friendly with the establishment that had co-opted her cause, preventing her from speaking out against their institutional agendas, even when they're manifestly anti-democratic in that they often impose their own constraints on women’s lives. Like kissing Hillary Clinton’s backside while she cackled about killing foreign leaders through U.S.-backed civil wars as secretary of state.

But as she said, she’s not passing the torch to anyone in particular. Instead, she lit a whole lot of torches with the hope of them building on her work. And a bunch of them should ideally belong to women on the populist, freedom-loving right.