Monica Moorehead, Workers World.
The passing of Gloria Steinem at age 92 on Sept. 2 evokes positive and negative views of what her legacy means for the modern-day women’s movement in the U.S., ignited in the early 1970s. She was the face of this mass movement, which helped to shine a bright light on sexist attitudes and policies that continue to permeate every aspect of this male-dominated society. Today this is appropriately referred to in a broader understanding as gender oppression. Feminism helped to define this important period of mass struggle.
Within any mass movement there exist political currents representing bourgeois and working-class forces and various nuances in between. In the case of this particular movement, which found inspiration from the Civil Rights struggles, bourgeois feminists, personified by Steinem, dominated the political direction to one within the capitalist system.
Steinem was in the forefront of organizing national protests and rallies, especially those held in Washington, D.C., that demanded the creation of rape crisis centers, shelters for battered women, day care centers for working mothers and reproductive justice, including the right to abortion.
The strength of the women’s movement had a tremendous impact on the conservative, male-dominated U.S. Supreme Court landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion on Jan. 22, 1973.
In 1971, Steinem was the main catalyst for creating Ms. Magazine that included articles by women to promote feminist empowerment and awareness. Steinem was also a proponent for women breaking the glass ceiling of climbing the corporate and banking ladder — which male billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk still overwhelmingly predominate today — and becoming CEOs.
Since her passing, a not so well-known side of Steinem that has emerged is her part in founding a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) front group, the Independent Research Service, from 1959-1962. Her CIA involvement was confirmed by an exposé that appeared in the radical magazine Ramparts in 1967. This anti-communist group was tasked with investigating World Youth Festivals held in the 1950s and 1960s hosted by anti-imperialist governments.
The CIA has a sordid, notorious history of undermining and overthrowing governments and movements seeking independence and sovereignty from imperialist domination and plunder, most notably in Chile, Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia and Iran. This history also includes racism and sexism amongst the CIA’s ranks. This brings into serious question Steinem’s lack of connections with women’s issues before 1970.
No orientation towards fighting racism
When this writer became aware of the women’s movement as an African American college activist, it held no real interest, because the movement did not uplift the national oppression of Black women or other women of color, an integral part of the class oppression of poor and working women in general. The leadership of this movement was opposed to showing solidarity with the right of representation of Black women even within the bourgeois electoral arena.
For instance, Steinem supported the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and not the candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president. In protest against this lack of support from Steinem and others, Chisholm resigned from the National Women’s Political Caucus, set up by the National Organization of Women, which was supposedly created to support women candidates.
In her 1984 groundbreaking book “When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America,” Paula Giddings explores the historical and political relationship between racism and sexism in the U.S. and how certain white feminists have succumbed to racist ideology for generations. In so many words, Giddings was referring to the Gloria Steinems of the world and the movement they represent.
In her preface, Giddings wrote: “Throughout their history, Black women also understood the relationship between the progress of the race and their own feminism. Women’s rights were an empty promise if Afro-Americans were crushed under the heel of a racist power structure. In times of racial militancy, Black women threw their considerable energies into that struggle — even at the expense of their feminist yearnings.” (page 7)
The U.S. women’s movement has its roots a century earlier with the women’s suffrage movement in upstate New York led by Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and others who were also white. While this movement organized for women’s right to vote, it demonstrated a lack of interest and even disdain for demands made by Black women suffragists like Ida B. Wells to build anti-lynching campaigns in both the South and the North. This lack of anti-racist solidarity served to weaken the women’s movement, which has really never recovered from this glaring omission.
Roots of women and gender oppression
An indispensable theoretical contribution to understanding the shortcomings of the U.S. women’s movement was made by Dorothy Ballan, a founding member of Workers World Party, who wrote the pamphlet “Feminism and Marxism” in 1971.
Ballan challenged the bourgeois notions of prominent feminists such as Kate Millett, who Ballan quoted as saying, “The relationship between the sexes is and always has been a political one — a continuing power struggle in which women are sometimes idolized, other times patronized, always exploited.”
Ballan provides a Marxist, historical view that the relationship between the sexes has not always been a continuing power struggle, nor has it always been one based on exploitation of women; rather, human relations – communal relations between people of all genders, are much older than politics and exploitation. There was a protracted period of human history, devoid of any exploitation or divisions – which was known as the matriarchy. The supremacy of one sex over the other began with the patriarchy, which began with the advent of class society.
Regarding the necessity for building working-class solidarity, Ballan put the onus of this task on white women based on a commitment to fight white supremacy: “The Black woman and the white woman are both concerned with the struggle against male supremacy. However, the Black woman faces an overriding problem which far exceeds in importance and significance the problem of male supremacy. That of course is the problem of white supremacy. In this latter struggle she sees the need to unite with Black men to struggle for Black Liberation for their very survival. This problem arises, as we said, because the whites — both women and men — constitute an oppressing nation in the system of imperialism. And the Black men and women are in an oppressed nation.”
Ballan continues: “Unless this is very clearly understood by the white woman, any type of relationship between the white woman and the Black woman will be of an extremely superficial and tenuous character and will lead in the long run to mutual hostility.”
“This is a very crucial point, and the Women’s Liberation Movement, at the present time, largely white and middle class in character, cannot hope to have any meaningful alliance with Black women without first taking this into account. The road to any alliance between Black and white women lies first in the recognition that the alliance must be based principally on a struggle against racist imperialism.”
Ballan goes on to explain that all patriarchal, sexist ideas emanate from the ruling class, not from individual males, a prevailing view of the women’s movement. The Women’s Caucus of Youth Against War and Fascism, a mass arm of Workers World Party, reflected this class view within this movement, both in theory and in the streets.
While winning any reforms through struggle under capitalism is important, Ballan stresses that only a socialist revolution can lay the basis for eradicating not only patriarchy but also all forms of class divisions, including white supremacy and LGBTQIA2S+ oppression.
Go to www.workers.org/book/feminism-marxism to read Ballan’s full pamphlet.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.