Tributes to Gloria Steinem, whom the media dubbed the "face of feminism" after she entered the feminist movement in 1969 -- while containing a great deal of heartfelt praise, overwhelmingly are repeating the myth that Steinem is responsible for just about every positive change in women's lives that took place during the modern feminist movement/Second Wave of feminism. Yet, she, herself, has admitted that she became a feminist based on the work of the women who had started the movement early in the 1960's and had already popularized it throughout the U.S. by the time that she joined.

These women had mostly come out of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement and had Left as well as feminist credentials, but they suddenly became invisible to the media that had previously courted them, when the much more glamorous and well-connected Steinem arrived on the scene.This is not to say that Steinem contributed nothing to keeping feminism alive or that Ms, the feminist magazine she founded as a professionally produced--even 'slick'--magazine didn't help to spread feminism. Only that Ms promoted a watered down and de-radicalized version of feminism compared to the radical feminism that had come before it.

As Jenny Brown pointed out in her Sept. 4 article in Jacobin magazine:(https://jacobin.com/2026/09/steinem-feminism-ms-cia-socialism):

"Steinem did wield enormous influence. Ms. magazine and the Ms. Foundation for Women, which she cofounded,came to define what was worthy in the feminist project. But to the women’s liberation pioneers she displaced, this meant silencing the radicals and promoting the anodyne....” feminist pioneers saw Steinem as taking credit for work already done by the movement.

The Women’s Liberation Movement didn’t need Ms. to publicize it. It had already been on the front page of nearly every mass circulation magazine and had produced ten mass-market anthologies by 1971, selling millions of copies. The movement published one hundred small newspapers and journals, including Off Our Backs, It Ain’t
Me Babe, and Woman’s World. And it had already won substantial victories by the time Steinem emerged on the scene. Thousands of workingclass women were suing employers for sex discrimination. Abortion was legalized in New York State in 1970. The Equal Rights Amendment passed the House of Representatives in 1971 and the Senate in March 1972, followed immediately by twenty-two states."

And then there were the revelations of Steinem's connections to the CIA and the questions of whether her rise to stardom in the feminist movement had had anything to do with these. Brown, in her Jacobin article, goes on to say:

"In 1967, the left-wing magazine Ramparts exposed the river of secret CIA money flowing into the National Student Association, the United States’ largest student group. After the revelations, Steinem spoke to the press about her role in recruiting anti-communist students to attend and disrupt the World Youth Festivals, which started in the socialist world and planned for the first time to venture outside the iron curtain in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962.

She worked full-time as director of the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, later renamed the Independent Research Service (IRS), a CIA conduit that flooded the festivals with anti-communist and pro-US propaganda. At the Helsinki festival, which drew 18,000 people from 137 countries, the IRS produced
a daily newspaper published in three languages, coedited by Steinem and Clay Felker. One of the 1959 publications with her name on it,"

In this show we will look at all of this and try to make some sense out of it.

Our guests will be Kathie Sarachild, who was a Civil Rights Worker and founded one of the first radical feminist groups, New York Radical Women, and was an early founder of Redstockings. We will ask Kathie why Redstockings published research on Gloria Steinem and the CIA in 1975; and Nellie Hester Bailey, a radical housing activist fighting gentrification in Harlem, who stood up to threats by Gloria Steinem's lawyers when she wanted to publish the Redstockings revelations in the Newspaper of the Columbia Tenants Union.

We'll discuss the whole problem of radical organizing being supplanted by liberal organizing in capitalist America.

BIO's of Guests:

KATHIE SARACHILD

Born in 1943, Kathie Amatniek adopted the matrilineal name form Kathie Sarachild in 1968 as part of her rising feminist consciousness. A civil rights activist during Freedom Summer in 1964, she worked to register voters in Mississippi. A pioneer in the Women’s Liberation Movement, she fought against restrictions on the lives of women, helping to found New York Radical Women in 1967, and Redstockings, which in 1969 hosted the first public speakout on abortion, shattering the taboo on the subject. A theoretician of the women’s movement, Sarachild is known for her article, “Consciousness-Raising, A Radical Weapon.” She was an editor of and contributor to Feminist Revolution a significant history and analytic tool by Redstockings. She remains active with Redstockings as director of its Archives for Action, which can be reached at Redstockings.org.

NELLIE HESTER BAILEY

Nellie Hester Bailey is a prominent human rights activist known for her significant contributions to social justice and tenant rights. Her major achievements include: Co-founding the Harlem Tenants Council (HTC) in 1994, where she organized marches and community forums to combat gentrification in Harlem. She co-led the Columbia Tenants Union, where she came under threat of being sued by Gloria Steinem if she published the Redstockings research on Steinem's CIA connections in the newspaper of the Columbia Tenants Union: Heights and Valleys. She published it anyway. She has participated in many Social Justice movements including anti-war efforts and women's advocacy and received numerous awards including the Alston Bannerman Fellowship and the Union Square Award for Grassroots Activists in 2001 for her dedication to community service. She has been a member of WBAI's Black Agenda Report, where she hosted and produced a number of radio shows. She has organized significant delegations to international forums, representing the interests of marginalized communities.

We will also be taking your phone calls at 212 209-2877 in the latter half of the show.