CIA veteran Gloria Steinem has died.
She helped Langley win the Cold War
while women remain blacksited and broken
raining teeth from bloody mouths
like the reds in Pinochet’s torture camps.
In this CIA civilization
women
slap name tags over baby vomit stains
smiling ear to ear for chortling customers
who shovel cheesecarbs into their faces
while she juggles dishpans and breast pumps
and goes home to collapse in bed
and dream about work,
women
take selfies in IDF uniforms
and do TikTok dances
on the ruins of Gaza
and pilot Girl Power drones
and drop Girl Power bombs
onto mothers clawing at the rubble,
women
stand with sedated eyes
stranded in suburban deserts
spooning cereal into restless children
until hubby comes home
to rape everyone in the house,
women
hate their bodies so much
they remove the fat from their cheeks
so they look like skeletons
and then freeze their faces
trying to look twenty
and it freezes their minds at twenty
and their hearts stay stuck at twenty
and they don’t grow
and they don’t heal
and they don’t know any better
than to call their daughters fat
and stick porcupine quills in their flesh,
women
spend their lives staring
at the side of a man’s head
yearning to be loved
and feeling their light fade
while he stares at a screen
and makes loud noises
to drown out the echoes
of his father’s fists cracking
on the bones of his face,
women
tear strips off each other’s flesh
to win the approval of wolf-mouthed men
who gobble up the carnage
and then choose a favorite slave.
Gloria Steinem was not a girl’s girl.
Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl.
Pick me, CIA.
Pick me, empire.
I’ll be a good little supplicant for the banker boys.
I will starve feminism of its boobs and belly,
shave it back to into the image of a child,
put a tie on it and call it equal.
I will say to the ladies:
“Get out of the kitchen
and into the Amazon warehouse!
Take off that apron
and put on this efficiency tracker!
It monitors your calories, too!
10,000 steps a day for the empire.
Congratulations, you do two jobs now.”
And I will return my magical baby portal
back to sender
unused in my box.
I promise I won’t even peek
at my own life-creating god potential.
I will poo-poo it even, if anyone asks.
Who cares if we can make life?
We can make money!
That’s much more important.
I will civilize us hairy juicy vag goddesses,
sir.
You can count on me.
Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl,
and boy was she ever picked.
But now she is dead,
and the empire is dying,
and the drumbeats of the wild
are unnerving the boys at Langley.
Something is stirring within us.
Something ancient.
Something forgotten.
Something moves within our wombs
which they tried to paralyze long ago.
The drums are getting louder,
and we are growing increasingly feral.
The time is coming,
and coming up fast,
where we will stand before them,
blood-bladed and hairy-bushed,
the wreckage of Langley beneath our feet,
saying,
I am not civilized,
motherfucker.
I am not fucking civilized.
___________________
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By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America — Gloria Steinem, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51529123
GLORIA STEINEM AND THE DOMESTICATION OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT
Gloria Steinem became the most famous establishment face of American feminism. But her political legacy is also one that considerably undermined women's liberation.
Before becoming a feminist celebrity, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, secretly financed by the CIA to send anti-communists to the 1959 Vienna and 1962 Helsinki World Youth Festivals to carry out pro-imperialist propaganda. When the CIA connection was exposed, Steinem acknowledged and defended it.
This was consistent with the politics she subsequently represented: liberal anti-communism, support for American capitalism, and confidence in the institutions of the existing political order.
The women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was potentially far more radical. Millions of working women demanded equal pay, childcare, reproductive freedom and economic independence. Mass demonstrations placed abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment on the national political agenda.
Steinem helped channel much of this insurgent movement toward lobbying, electoral campaigns and loyalty to the Democrat Party. She became a millionaire and embodied a bourgeois feminism increasingly concerned with middle-class and wealthy women's advancement rather than transforming the material conditions confronting working-class women.
The contradiction was enormous. The Democrat Party itself contained powerful forces hostile to abortion rights and the ERA. The 1972 Democratic National Convention rejected an abortion-rights plank. In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter opposed federal funding for abortion and declared that government should not attempt to make opportunities equal. Carter campaigned for and signed the Hyde Amendment stripping millions of poor women of meaningful access to abortion.
Yet liberal feminism increasingly instructed women to look toward Democrat politicians, courts and professional lobbying organizations rather than building an independent mass movement.
The consequences were disastrous. The ERA passed Congress in 1972 but died three states short of ratification in 1982. Instead of drawing the necessary conclusions from that defeat, the institutional women's movement became still more closely integrated into Democratic electoral politics.
Abortion rights followed the same trajectory. Bill Clinton popularized the formula that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Hillary Clinton repeatedly embraced and restated that formulation, including as a senator and presidential candidate. Instead of unapologetically defending abortion as a woman's right, Democrat leaders accepted the reactionary premise that abortion was something regrettable that should be minimized.
Meanwhile, working-class women did not benefit from female politicians, executives and millionaires. They needed decent wages, strong unions, universal childcare, paid maternity leave, healthcare, housing and unrestricted reproductive freedom.
After half a century of dependence upon Democrat politicians and the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
It would be wrong to hold Steinem personally responsible for every defeat suffered by American women, or to claim that she opposed abortion rights or the ERA. She supported both.
However, Steinem personified a bourgeois feminist strategy that subordinated the independent struggle of women to capitalism and the Democrat Party. Unfortunately that political legacy continues to undercut the fight for women's rights today, as most middle class "feminists" remain loyal to the Democrat Party that will never allow a real fight for women's rights.
A feminism capable of producing women senators, corporate executives and millionaires while millions of working women remain without childcare, adequate healthcare or reproductive rights has achieved equality principally for wealthier women. That is not women's liberation.
Only the working class has a material vested interest in the full emancipation and equality for all women.
___________________
Inside the Second Wave of Feminism
Boston Female Liberation, 1968-1972 An Account by Participants
by Nancy Rosenstock
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1887-inside-the-second-wave-of-feminism
An apt obituary. Thanks.