KR Bolton. 530 Words
Gloria Steinem died age 92 on September 2.
Steinem was one of the first and most enduring of the Establishment operatives to be employed by the CIA during what has been called the “Cultural Cold War.” This was when the CIA et al were promoting an anti-Soviet Left which laid the foundations for the New Left, including feminism. One of the ideological battlegrounds between the USSR and USA was the World Youth Festivals. It is here that Steinem began her career.
The Independent Research Service was the CIA-front of which Steinem was founding director. At the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival she ran the IRS press bureau. Later, she was exposed by a feminist journal, Redstockings, which questioned her association with the CIA, at the time when the CIA’s funding the National Students Association and other Leftist groups from which the New Left emerged, came under scrutiny. (“Redstockings Challenge Steinem & Ms.,” Off Our Backs (oob), New York, July 1975, 8).
Steinem’s explanation was that she regarded the CIA as a “progressive” “liberal “organization, laudable for its opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy, although she also threatened a lawsuit against those who raised the matter of her employment with a CIA front. (John D. Lofton Jnr., “Ms. Steinem’s CIA Connection,” Human Events, May 10, 1975). She had stated to The Washington Post in 1968, in regard to revelations about the CIA and NSA, that the CIA “was the only one with enough guts and foresight to see that youth and student affairs were important.” (oob, op. cit.).
The radical-feminist journal oob, reporting the Redstockings-Steinem controversy pointed out that Steinem was still listed as a member of the IRS Board of Directors during 1968-69, according to her entry in Who’s Who in America. oob asked how it was that Steinem rose to the leadership of “women’s liberation” so quickly, although she had hitherto been unknown to any movement or cause? oob pointed out that it was Steinem’s followers around her Ms. Magazine that had “all the money and power” within the women’s movement, and regarded Ms. as “a capitalist commercial enterprise.” oob wondered whether Ms. owed its existence to money from corporations, or whether it was a CIA set-up? (Ibid.).
Ms. Magazine was launched in 1971 with support from Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, the Establishment standard-bearer in journalism; the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Trust, (Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature, New York, Facts on file, 2013, entry: “Ms.”), and Warner Communications, which invested $1,000,000. Eighty-five thousand copies of the first issue were inserted gratis into the New York Magazine, where Steinem had been employed as a columnist by the magazine’s editor, Clay Felker, who had worked with Steinem at the 1962 Helsinki World Youth Festival. (Patricia Marcello, Gloria Steinem: A Biography , London: Greenwood Press, 2004, 73). Ms. was saved from bankruptcy in 1979 with a $200,000 grant from The New York Post, and a matching grant from the Ford Foundation. A total of $1.4 million was given by real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the U.S. News & World Report, among others. (Winifred Conkling, Ms. Gloria Steinem: A Life, New York: Square Fish, 2020, 26: “Status Changes.”)
The European New Zealander 