Gloria Steinem has died | Hacker News Reader

Gloria Steinem has died

theguardian.com

151 pointsmellosouls64 comments

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/us/politics/gloria-steine..., https://archive.ph/cfC1K

There is a great series about the womens movement called Mrs America.

I know it looks bleak right now with wealthy and powerful men tearing down every institution that feminism, progressivism, etc built, but remember that the political pendulum inevitably swings the other way.

We can have justice, and we will.

Disregard for consent is driving the insanity at the highest levels. I hope anyone reading this remembers their own power in resisting the machinations of the greedy who can never have enough, and puts their energy towards organizing for a brighter future for people and planet.

ah, if only that were true. there's a whole quote about the 'arc of history bending towards justice' but it's not an inevitability, that's just confirmation bias from the times we live in. if you were to ask a normal person living through one of the warlord eras of Chinese history, they might have preferred greatly the times they considered ancient when the rule-of-law was more stable. similarly, I'm sure your average medieval peasant living through an Inquisition may prefer the centuries where they weren't scrutinized by their neighbors for any sign of heresy

justice is defined and propagated by the people in their time who show up and do the work. the overturn of Roe v Wade was a 40-year-old project and one of the driving forces that created the Federalist Society, a society which now dominates the Supreme Court and many other courts of law [0]. they are also responsible for things like Citizen's United, the rise in 'tort reform' (ie corporate escape holes from liability), and a lot of other anti-populist case law

they out-organized the progressive legal types (with the help, of course, of the ultra-wealthy who saw a lot to be gained from defanged tax and labor law)

there's no taking things for granted at anytime. you either grit your teeth fighting for your rights, out-organize your opponents, and stay fighting or you get trod on and lose it all. the parable of the tortoise and the hare does a lot of work here

[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/10/roe-v-wade-federalist-so...

> there's a whole quote about the 'arc of history bending towards justice' but it's not an inevitability

I think it probably is inevitable, but it probably happens the reverse of the direction that the quote implies.

That is to say, I think our definition of justice bends towards whoever wins historical conflicts.

You may be right about that but they’re tearing things down overnight that took decades to build. And it will take more decades again to rebuild and repair. We’ll be spending most of our lives doing it.

RIP.

NYT obit (non-paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/us/politics/gloria-steine...

Reading other comments, it seems like people don't know that Gloria Steinem was a complicated figure, specifically her involvement with the CIA for at least 4 years is documented [1].

By all accounts, this was in the wake of the Red Scare and she was reporting on Communist activities by European student groups. At the same time she supported unionization efforts and fair pay for women. This is what I mean by complicated.

But more problematic was this statement [2]:

> While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Anyone who knows the history of the CIA knows it was completely off the rails in the 1950s and directly involved in if not responsible for many coups. Regime change by the US is so common there's a whole Wikipedia page about it [3].

Likewise, Steinem was anti-sex work, calling it "commercial rape" [4]. That's not really surprising for the time and you can't necessarily use the same norms from 2026 in the 1950s to 1980s.

You can appreciate her contributions to, for example, equal pay and advancement of feminism and what became known as women's liberation while acknowledging her complexities. I don't understand this need people have to rewrite history to be black and white and either deify or villify people when they die.

[1]: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R0003003...

[2]: https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[4]: https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/prosti...

"We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls" -- Gloria Steinem

This is naive. Men's and women's brains do not process information in the same way:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sax-on-sex/202405/ai...

Long story short; there is no similarity in how each gender's brains store and retrieve information

There was actually a "recent" series on the radio about this:

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/04/07/falling-behind-mised...

What does statistical analysis of society have to do with empirical neurological evidence of brain activity?

Replication crisis details ad nauseam how social psychology studies are only reproducible in 26-30% of cases. Almost all social sciences are worse than a coin toss. Including education.

What that says to me is social tropes as a basis for how we raise kids are massively out of alignment with how human biology relates to reality.

Women like Steinem argued against women being treated like concepts and objects by men (which I agree with).

But there is an irony in women using their biology's unique (relative to a mans) emotional and logical faculties to suggest they know best how men should behave.

If her actual point was we need to find the best means to support boys as we have with girls, sure. But "raise them like" does not readily communicate that nuance.

There is nothing in that study that says this is due to nurture instead of nature.

They trained a model to distinguish male study participants from female study participants based on resting fMRI data, which does not support your claim that they process information differently. Surprise, surprise, with an expressive enough model, this was possible with 90% accuracy. If they trained a model to distinguish employed people vs. unemployed people, I suspect they would have gotten a similar result because those two groups would be thinking about different things and thus consuming oxygen in different parts of their brains. Heck, the interaction between the gender of the MRI operator and the sexual preferences of the "healthy young" study participants would be enough to produce measurably different brain activity.

You're probably reading too much into it.

There's nothing biological about men's disinclination to wash dishes or write a birthday card.

That reads like one of those commonly held tropes that are not true. Like "back in my day it was possible to raise a family, buy a house, two cars and a boat on one salary." When the reality for the majority was both parents worked.

In the metro I live in of >2 million I have come across numerous men and women with their shit together at home and numerous men and women who live like feral dogs despite appearing at work with their shit together.

The actual quote seems to be “We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72290-we-ve-begun-to-raise-... among many other sources.

[flagged]

Can you please not post in a throwaway/flamewar style to HN? What you bring up is no doubt one relevant aspect of a long career, but on HN we want comments that enhance curious conversation, not kill it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. They include:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Eschew flamebait."

This is only half right. The capitalists loved feminism. Biggest expense of many businesses is labor. Double the labor pool, labor cost plummets, & profits skyrocket, so of course the capitalists at the CIA appreciated Steinem, and vice versa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#CIA_ties_and_le...

Would add that Alan Greenspan made a similar remark about his consulting firm. How he hired as many women as he could, since he could get sharp ones at a considerable discount.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5432331

Yes, and people understood it as it happened.

There's a Swedish song, which sees it like this "daghemmets utbygnadstakt regleras av konjunkturen, så tillmäts kvinnan sin plats i den ekonomiska strukturen, en billig arbetskraftsreserv till hands när fabrikerna visslarn, tillbakapressad av daghemsbrist, om lönsamhetens drivhjul plötsligt gnisslar" "The extension of day care is controlled by the economic demand, so woman is given her place in the economic structure, a cheap work-force reserve at hand when the factories want it; pushed back by too few daycares in case demand slows".

The interpretation isn't anti-feminist, and they see the game rather as a cynical game having little to do with what is in the interests of the women themselves.

I don't have an opinion on pro/anti feminism. I have a big opinion on paid mass manipulators -- especially ones being paid with public funds. It is outrageous --- that they steal our money, then have the gall to propagandize us with it. That they had her operate out of Europe also illustrates how they managed to work around Smith-Mundt at the time.

Yes, I'm specifically talking about the song.

If propaganda is to be used, it should be to inform the public without deception as to the sender or the purpose, not used to push a political position with public money with deception about the sender or the purpose.

> CIA operative tasked with obfuscating the socialist origins of feminism

I've read this sentence multiple times, but it still does not make sense to me

Right wing talking points. They see feminism as a threat (which it is to them, but for the good overall).

it really isn't - it's well-documented: https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy

"While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Less cloak-and-dagger and more a young, energetic, global representative for American values and freedom"

was part of the Cold War-era soft power projection for the US since Communist countries were uplifting their women a lot more intentionally and structurally, especially compared to their historic baseline [0]. it looks pretty bad if your primary values are freedom but they don't apply super well to half of your entire population

there's also a further-left critique of Steinem [1] as being the public face and visage of pro-American, capitalist feminism, someone who took it from being the more Emma Goldman/Combahee River Collective rooted form - a kind of 'JFK' for the masses to substitute for the more revolutionary ideals of, say, Malcolm X or Dr. King, both of whom were very unpopular in their time and often derided as 'asking for too much' [2]

[0]https://kristenghodsee.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/om...

[1]https://publicseminar.org/2016/06/feminisms-of-the-left-poli...

[2]https://news.gallup.com/vault/246167/protests-seen-harming-c...

> “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

"was" doing some heavy lifting.

Nothing against Steinem specifically but seems pretty clear the elders tend to view their past with rose colored glasses

Imo the federal apparatus should be broken up and handed to states with a mandate to collaborate to avoid concentration of power

> Imo the federal apparatus should be broken up and handed to states with a mandate to collaborate to avoid concentration of power

Is this generated by an LLM putting together random popular talking points without regard to whether they make sense together? What would it mean for the CIA to be handed to the states with a mandate to collaborate?

"CIA? What's that? Sounds like some populist gibberish that makes no sense." -- An American in 1900.

You had it all figured out in your other reply to me. Will leave it as an exercise to your clearly brilliant mind.

  [0] meh, what's the point?
  [1] was coming from a Marxist, and Marxists are going to Marxist.
  [2] had nothing about feminism

You're trying to muddy the waters with your positioning. Women's rights are just that. Commingling the concept with economic theory, other civil rights movements, government propaganda, etc doesn't detract from the core concept of: should women be second class citizens in this world?

And another commenter talked about rights as being via the State, but in the end, rights are freedoms, and in the concept of the State it's a handshake agreement that the State will honor those freedoms.

Those same rights are also being challenged by religious doctrine (arguably the State in earlier times).

Women's rights are human rights. We all win when that happens (except for those that exploit and abuse them).

I didn't initially understand your comment, but you mean basically something like that the origin of feminism was in socialism and the CIA saw that it was going to be unavoidable or at least popular and wanting to avoid this leading to socialism becoming popular they decided to make a bastardized version that cuts off any socialist aspect and just turn the whole thing into the modern liberal feminism?

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