by WorldTribune Staff, September 6, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
Gloria Steinem passed away on Sept. 2. She was 92.
What was her historical impact?
Critics such as Betty Friedan argued that Steinem became the face of the women’s movement primarily because she was a “looker” who appealed to male-dominated media.
Modern critics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw have questioned whether Steinem’s advocacy truly served all women.
Conservative and independent critics often accused Steinem of a double standard in how she handled male misconduct, her defense of Bill Clinton being most prominent.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade and a rising cultural push toward traditional gender roles, critics of second-wave feminism argue that Steinem’s movement failed to build a lasting foundation.
Corporate media had no use for these topics, instead giving Steinem the halo treatment, The American Spectator columnist Scott McKay noted.
McKay wrote that he wasn’t out to “lionize” Steinem but to paint “the picture the propaganda press is going to paint of somebody who spent the better part of a century driving a wedge between the sexes. Rather, I’m going to give a fair accounting of a legacy which is mixed, at best, and a challenge.”
For instance, McKay pointed out that the Left failed to mention that Steinem was at one time a CIA asset.
“She was one, you know.
“From 1958 to 1962, Gloria Steinem ran something called the Independent Research Service. It helped to send American students to international youth festivals, which sounds innocent enough, except that’s little more than a cover story. In point of fact, what the Independent Research Service was actually doing was recruiting photogenic young liberals to disrupt Communist confabs for kids in Vienna and Helsinki. This all came out in 1967 when the New York Times and Washington Post ran stories exposing the organization and its CIA funding, and Steinem was quite open about what she’d done. Steinem told the Washington Post the outfit was ‘liberal, nonviolent and honorable,’ and later said she would do it again…
“…When Steinem was later running around the country trashing every American institution as a conspiracy against women, after coming to public view as a CIA minion, the irony probably should have been discrediting. It wasn’t.”
Why wasn’t it discrediting?
“Probably because Gloria Steinem was the one second-wave feminist who didn’t prove Rush Limbaugh’s later-arriving maxim that feminism was invented as a means of giving unattractive women access to mainstream American society,” McKay wrote.
“Gloria Steinem was a looker. That’s why people paid attention to the subversive and divisive things she said. She was the most bankable face of that movement, which spent lots of time and energy attacking concentrated and unaccountable power, and she was a CIA asset.
“Anybody on the Left want to explain how that happens?”
While Steinem was the exception, McKay continued, Friedan “was the rule itself.”
“Friedan was old and plain and not especially charismatic or engaging, but Friedan actually did real work for the feminist movement; not that much of it has aged all that well from a societal standpoint, but she wrote The Feminine Mystique and co-founded the National Organization for Women. She did that while Steinem was gracing magazine covers and going to galas.”
McKay continued: “And it would be nice if somebody would justify this, particularly in an age when some astonishingly large percentage of American females are recording themselves engaging in utterly shallow, banal, and mindless behavior while attempting to monetize themselves as ‘influencers’ as part of female empowerment. Is this what second-wave feminists were going for? If not, then why was Gloria Steinem the face of the movement? Was it not eminently foreseeable that feminism would devolve into AOC and ‘Same, Lindsay’ when it chose cute and shallow as its avatar?”
Related: Wages of evil are . . .? One attorney’s take on the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, September 6, 2026
Steinem was not exactly consistent, McKay noted:
“Take her positions on Bill Clinton, after all. In March 1998, after the devastating Kathleen Willey 60 Minutes interview, which came while the president was in court with Paula Jones, the woman it seems quite clear he sexually assaulted, Gloria Steinem explained in a Times op-ed that even if the allegations against Clinton were true, he was ‘not guilty of sexual harassment.’
“Why? Because he had ‘taken no for an answer.’
“Which was not, and is not, in evidence.
“Steinem went further. The Monica Lewinsky case, she wrote, meant that ‘yes means yes.’
“Welcome sex, she said, ‘is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.’ ”
When it came to Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, Steinem said she “wouldn’t write the same thing now” as she did in defense of Clinton because “there’s probably more known about other women now.” But she said she was glad she wrote it then.
“Steinem famously said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and that marriage in this country had been ‘the model for slavery law.’ Millions of women took that to heart,” McKay noted. “But in 2000, when her value as a celebrity and sex symbol had declined, she married a Manhattan Beach millionaire NGO activist named David Bale, a native South African and British citizen with visa problems (David Bale’s son from his second marriage, the one before Steinem came along, is the actor Christian Bale). Asked about getting hitched after she’d trashed the institution her whole life, she said she hadn’t changed, but marriage had.”
So what is Steinem’s legacy?
“Steinem’s feminism treated ordinary men, marriage, and child-rearing with open suspicion,” McKay wrote. “The legacy corporate media, the people slobbering all over her now, gave her an open platform to do it. She spent decades as the public voice insisting men were, structurally and individually, the problem to be managed rather than partners to be won over.
“And how’s that working out for America 60 years on?
“Marriage rates? In the toilet.
“Birth rates? Well below replacement. Dangerously below, in fact.
“Relations between men and women? So terrible that there are women posting on social media that gender reveals tell them whether they’re going to have a girl or an abortion.
“That’s what happens when your movement is fronted by, and this is my best compliment for Gloria Steinem, an exceptionally gifted packager of other people’s grievances. Gloria Steinem was the unbought voice of American women, and she did real, lasting damage.
“We can thank Steinem for abortion becoming the sacrament of female citizenship — the one economic activity immune to regulation. We can thank her for making the two-parent household a lifestyle option rather than the normal way children are raised, and giving us all the friendly outcomes that has produced. We can thank her for teaching educated women that domestic life was a trap; that certainly contributed to a fertility collapse among the people who read Ms. Magazine, which she founded and ran.”
