Gloria Steinem Obituary: Controversial Feminist Legacy, CIA Ties and Criticism of Corporate Feminism
Gloria Steinem’s brand of corporate feminism was always a perfect fit for the Western imperialist project. Bourgeois identity politics that neatly commodified women’s liberation while systematically erasing the only thing that matters to poor women around the globe.
Gloria Steinem’s brand of corporate feminism was always a perfect fit for the Western imperialist project. Bourgeois identity politics that neatly commodified women’s liberation while systematically erasing the only thing that matters to poor women around the globe.
Her CIA ties should be the headline of every obituary because they were the logical extension of a worldview that saw the Global South as a testing ground for social engineering and real blue collar women on the picket line as an embarrassment to her elite friends on the cocktail-party scene.
By reducing patriarchy to a problem of individual advancement and media representation, she provided ideological cover for neoliberal capitalism’s assault on the working class. Her work cheered women into boardrooms, Amazon warehouses and global south sweat shops alike, as long as the real engine of history, the collective power of labour, remained broken the gravy train for the billionaire class could roll on. In death, as in life, her legacy is not sisterhood, but a stern, well-manicured finger wagging in the mirror back at herself for betraying poor working Women across the globe.
