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Give Steinem The Credit She Earned
Gloria Steinem died yesterday at 92 [ [link removed] ]. For more than half a century, she was one of the best-known faces of the women’s movement, co-founding Ms. magazine in 1972 and the National Women’s Political Caucus [ [link removed] ] a year earlier, and later helping launch the Ms. Foundation for Women [ [link removed] ], which spent decades bankrolling grassroots organizing on the left.
And she deserves credit.
Steinem pushed against a culture that too often shut women out of careers and positions they were perfectly capable of holding. She helped bring subjects like sexual harassment and domestic violence out into the open, where they belonged. She pushed for women to be taken seriously in politics, journalism and professional life.
Women should not be denied opportunities simply because they are women. That sounds pretty obvious today.
It wasn’t always.
She Was A Woman Of The Left
But Gloria Steinem was never simply an equal-rights crusader.
She was a committed activist of the political left. Steinem served as an honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America [ [link removed] ]. She endorsed Democratic candidates in election after election, campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, worked closely with organized labor and made abortion rights one of the defining causes of her life.
Equal treatment under the law, and letting women pursue whatever careers and lives they wanted, fit comfortably within the American promise that people should be judged as individuals and afforded equal rights.
Steinem’s politics went much further — a left-wing view of society and who held power. Sex discrimination was not simply a matter of removing legal barriers or changing bad attitudes toward women in the workplace and at home. It became part of a larger theory about groups, power structures and oppression, one borrowed heavily from the socialist and labor movements she aligned herself with for decades.
Equality Was Not Enough
Abortion became central to that project. This was not some peripheral issue she happened to support. Steinem spoke openly about her own abortion, obtained illegally before Roe v. Wade, and spent much of her public life fighting to preserve and expand abortion rights nationwide.
Abortion is not an ordinary disagreement over tax rates or government spending. It raises a profound moral question about when human life deserves legal protection, one that divides Americans of good faith on both sides. By making support for abortion rights a central part of modern feminism, Steinem helped attach one of the country’s most contentious political questions to a movement that had once made a much broader claim for equal treatment.
She also embraced democratic socialism and organized labor, and her politics increasingly emphasized group identity and systems of oppression rather than individual rights.
You cannot have too much equality before the law. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was everything Steinem insisted had to come with it.
When Feminism Became Partisan
Sarah Palin provided a pretty good demonstration in 2008.
Here was the first Republican woman ever nominated for vice president. She had been elected governor of Alaska and was now the running mate of a major-party presidential nominee — exactly the sort of political achievement earlier generations of women had struggled for decades to make possible, the kind Steinem had spent a career arguing women deserved the chance to reach.
Steinem dismissed her anyway, branding Palin part of the “anti-feminist right wing” [ [link removed] ] because she opposed abortion and rejected Steinem’s politics. A woman had broken through, and it didn’t matter — feminism now came with an ideological admissions test, one that had nothing to do with whether a woman had broken a barrier and everything to do with whether she voted the right way once she got there.
Being “for women” increasingly meant being for a particular political agenda, one that lined up overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party and the broader American left.
That is partisan politics dressed in the language of gender. And it left a lot of women — women who broke real barriers, who ran companies and states and campaigns — permanently outside the movement that was supposed to speak for them.
So, Does It Matter?
Gloria Steinem accomplished important things. Much of her politics was deeply controversial. That doesn’t erase what she got right.
She helped tear down barriers that should have come down. Women today routinely occupy professions, boardrooms, newsrooms and positions of political leadership that earlier generations of women had to fight much harder to enter.
America is better for that.
But she also spent decades tying the movement to abortion rights, democratic socialism and a broader political worldview built around group identity and political power — one where a woman’s standing depended on her politics as much as her achievements.
That part of her legacy deserves scrutiny, not canonization, and it shouldn’t simply be waved away just because its architect has now passed.
So give Gloria Steinem credit for the barriers she helped knock down.
And just don’t confuse that with an endorsement of everything she was working to build in their place.
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