Radical Chick

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

In the late 1950s, Gloria Steinem went to work for an organization called the Independent Research Service, in which capacity she helped organize delegations of young progressive Americans—young, progressive, non-communist or anti-communist Americans—to attend worldwide youth meetings otherwise dominated by (and usually organized by) the Soviet Union. It was a way of communicating to young progressives abroad that there was room for left-leaning idealists on the American side of the Cold War, that Moscow was not the only political center—or even the natural one—for such ambitions. Of course it was a CIA front, as Steinem later acknowledged unapologetically. While many of her progressive allies saw the CIA as something from an Oliver Stone fever dream, Steinem insisted that the agency she had worked for had been professionally run, liberal in its sensibilities, and interested in means beyond violence for achieving its ends.

 

The CIA connection is one of many details in which Steinem’s life curiously mirrored that of her near-contemporary (only nine years her senior) William F. Buckley Jr., who briefly served in the CIA in the early 1950s, a few years before Steinem. (It is a myth that the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom provided the initial financing for National Review, though National Review editor James Burnham had helped to set up the organization, which did fund publications and organizations such as Partisan Review.) Steinem, like Buckley, was a charismatic young journalist who made a reputation at a young age, who founded organizations and a magazine that was her major contribution to intellectual life, who published works of memoir and autobiography but never wrote a “big book” of the kind associated with public intellectuals; both had Hollywood connections through their families, with Buckley’s son, Christopher, being the author of Thank You for Smoking and Steinem being stepmother to actor Christian Bale. As with Buckley, it is easy to go through Steinem’s words over the years and find many things that she probably wished she had not said or written and many things that her admirers certainly wish she hadn’t said or written.

 

Steinem was many things in life, from undercover Playboy bunny to an honorary chairman (forgive me) of the Democratic Socialists of America. About the latter, it is worth appreciating that Steinem’s anti-communism did not end with her career at Central Intelligence: Her Ms. magazine performed a public service by promoting the work of exiled Soviet feminists (in a Ms. cover story, promoted just below the “Male Strippers?” feature), who described a union of socialist republics in which the egalitarian dogma was entirely at odds with the facts on the ground. Of course life in Soviet Russia was patriarchal, one of the exiles observed: “The major difference is that women in the Soviet Union have no right to protest.”

 

For much of the 20^th century, Steinem was on the left wing of what used to be known as “Cold War liberalism,” the political tendency that produced figures such as Steinem on its radical edge, President Harry Truman and Sen. Henry Jackson at its center, and on its right side figures such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the intellectuals who eventually would come to be known as the neoconservatives. Her ideas were American ideas—when they were right and when they were wrong.

 

Mostly, they were wrong. Steinem managed to be on the wrong side of practically every specific political issue about which she took a definite view, from supporting Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 to her radical-chic socialist posturing to the ghoulish lifelong enthusiasm for abortion that so nearly defines her public career. But if there is a throughline connecting her anti-communist work at the CIA way back in the Eisenhower years to her à la mode liberationist zeal in the 1970s to the plodding, greatest-hits tediousness of her final decades, it is an admirable one: She opposed totalitarianism, subjugation, and coercion, and she saw the tragedy in lives that were made unnecessarily small and miserable by forces beyond the control of those individuals—not only women—who have little opportunity to act but instead are acted upon.

 

Of her many incarnations, the one that seems to me the best—and most effective for the things that Steinem herself wanted to accomplish—was her jet-setting 1970s activist-journalist happy warrior era, when she seemed to be having just a little bit too much fun for some of her fellow feminists to stomach, when she was accused of being too interested in and too reliant upon glamour. It may be amusing to think of the famous feminist dolled up and costumed as a Playboy bunny, but the journalism she produced from that experience was first-rate: Her readers got an idea of the informal expectations attached to bunny life from the details Steinem reported, including the fact that bunnies were made to get STD screenings as a condition of employment. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, embarrassed by the story, had his club’s policies changed. As a journalist, Steinem did real work. And she was a pretty good advertisement for her worldview in those years, not only because she fit the bunny costume.

 

I am reminded again of Buckley, who both abominated the “Playboy philosophy” and wrote at times for Playboy, joking that it was the only forum in which he could be sure of reaching his son. (I suppose I should note here that I also wrote once for Playboy, a fact that seems to have embarrassed the former owners. I suppose I am too disreputable for the softer kind of pornographers.) Writers do as they must—they go where the readers are. Steinem came from a left that was a bit less scolding and a bit less moralistic than the one we have now. For a while there, she seemed to be having a pretty good time.

 

Steinem found much to criticize in the time and place to which she was born, and much of her criticism was merited. But she also was born into a time and place that made possible a career such as hers—or, rather, that made it possible for her to make possible a career such as hers. All in all, I prefer the milieu that produced Steinem and Buckley—and Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Joan Didion—to the one that has to its credit Joe Rogan and some people who play computer games while other people watch them playing computer games. Steinem was born the year Adolf Hitler became führer and lived into the age of artificial intelligence—that is an awful lot of history to be mostly, tragically, but not exceptionlessly wrong about. But she was, fundamentally, right about the one big thing that held her attention, and it is to her credit that some women today are treated less shoddily than they were a century ago. Gloria Marie Steinem, dead at 92. RIP.