Ms. Foundation For Women 2016 Gloria Awards Gala & After Party
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CIA asset. Former Playboy bunny. The face of the feminist movement. 

Those are three ways headlines have described feminist Gloria Steinem since her passing at the age of 92. To read just those three things about a major figure like Steinem, it’s easy to draw conclusions about who she was. 

For Steinem, those three descriptors are more misleading than they are helpful. They completely miss the reality of her legacy and ignore the Black women who shaped it. 

When you consider that Steinem was a white feminist credited with leading the women’s movement, the lens narrows even further. Most of the coverage of Steinem so far has maligned, if not completely erased, the Black women who inspired her and who were instrumental in building and growing the women’s movement. 

Steinem’s stint as a Playboy bunny was short-lived and never meant to be considered a core part of her career trajectory. She went undercover as a reporter at the Playboy Club for a story for Show magazine and exposed the underbelly of Hugh Hefner’s business hidden behind all its marketed glitz and glamour. Through her reporting, she discovered Playboy bunnies were forced to work long, grueling hours, experienced constant sexual harassment, and in most cases were compensated far less than advertised. 

Part of her reporting also unearthed that Black women hired to become Playboy bunnies were marginalized and often referred to as “Chocolate Bunnies.” This firsthand look at how Black women bore the brunt of sexism and racism in the industry added to her early understanding of how overlapping oppressions showed up in the lives of Black women. 

Just as mainstream media hyper-focused on her stint as a Playboy bunny, they also latched onto her early intelligence ties. Steinem has claimed over the years that her associations with the CIA have been overblown and misconstrued. She has stated that the organizations she worked with to coordinate attendance at international youth festivals received funding from the CIA but that she was never asked to report on American nationals or assess foreign nationals. However, within the Black community where the CIA’s historical weaponization against civil rights leaders during that era remains a deep wound, this chapter of her life continued to spark intense skepticism and, in many ways, complicated her relationship with the Black community. 

To call Steinem the face of the feminist movement is perhaps the most accurate descriptor, but it is also where the erasure of Black women is perhaps the most glaring. She became the face of the feminist movement even as she frequently credited Black women for teaching her through their example, showing her how to resist and fight for equality. 

Dorothy Pitman Hughes was one of those Black women who, if racism had not trumped sexism in feminist circles and in the larger media landscape, would have easily emerged as the face of the movement either above or right alongside Steinem. 

Steinem first met her in the late 1960s while working as a reporter assigned to interview Hughes about her pioneering work at a childcare center in New York. The two became close friends and would go on to travel across the country together, speaking out on behalf of women’s rights. In 1971, they took the infamous black-and-white photograph showing both of them with their fists raised in solidarity. 

Although Steinem regularly credited Hughes with coaching her on how to become a polished public speaker, deepening her understanding of racism, and schooling her on issues like childcare, Steinem was pushed to the forefront as the most visible representative of the women’s movement.  When the two traveled together, Steinem got most of the media’s attention, while Hughes was pushed to the margins and largely ignored. 

Over the years, while Steinem continued to solidify her status as the most well-known feminist in the country, she kept positioning herself alongside powerhouse Black women. This was true even as mainstream media continued to crop them out of the prevailing narratives about the fight for women’s equality. 

When Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in the 1970s, she entrusted trailblazing authors and editors like Alice Walker and Margaret Sloan-Hunter to help shape the publication’s editorial voice. 

Even with those efforts, systemic erasure persisted, and Walker ultimately resigned from the magazine in 1986 after becoming frustrated with the ongoing lack of diversity on its covers. In her resignation letter, she addressed the dearth of Black women on the cover, writing, “In real life, people of color occur with much more frequency,” and then added, “I do not feel welcome in the world you are projecting.” 

When Shirley Chisholm ran for President in 1972, Steinem championed her groundbreaking campaign. Steinem’s commitment to shifting political power and putting the American presidency in the hands of a woman for the first time continued into recent years, when she supported both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ runs for President. 

Steinem’s activism continued until the very end. Ever the masterful strategist, Steinem left us with one final essay, a final interview, and what is expected to be her final book as the ultimate contributions to her own legacy. 

Her final lengthy TV interview, taped a couple of years before her death, was part obit and part personal farewell to everyone watching. It debuted on Netflix the day she died as Famous Last Words: Gloria Steinem, and featured a sit-down interview between her and series creator Brad Falchuk. 

When discussing her role as the most visible leader of the feminist movement, Steinem pinned it down to pure endurance. She noted that her other partners in the struggle for women’s rights had children and other careers, leaving her to simply outlast them. At no point did she mention the racism her peers experienced from the media and beyond that maligned them and kept them from achieving higher visibility. 

For a Black audience looking at how she is remembered and who among us has been forgotten and maligned, this final goodbye exposes a hard truth. By taking the reins to control her final narrative across multiple platforms, Steinem had a prime opportunity to forcefully push Black women into the center of the frame. She could have spent her parting words focused on Black women and other maligned communities who built the foundation right beside her and those who are doing the important work of pushing for equality now. Sadly, she chose not to.

What’s expected to be her last book, An Unexpected Life, will be released later this month. Her last essay appeared in The New Yorker the day she died, and perhaps the most resonant part of that essay was her reminder that the greatest challenge to equality is those who benefit from inequality. And that those people are often people whose “power rests on the group they were born into” and who “fear what might happen if they have no built-in advantage.” Touché, Ms. Steinem, touché.

That commentary on built-in advantages makes her final onscreen action even more ironic and disappointing. At the very end of her Netflix documentary, she looked directly into the camera to deliver a final message to the audience, explicitly asking viewers that the most important thing we can do for each other is to share our own stories and “know each other through stories.”

While asking the audience to claim their own narratives sounds powerful, it still allows Steinem’s towering, white legacy to obscure the Black women who made her activism possible. This was her final opportunity to truly give back to Black women by platforming and centering us. She could have compelled the public to face our erasure, and she could have pushed the next generation of white feminists to become better allies than she ultimately proved to be. 

Instead, her silence became the final anchor for her whiteness. Black women built the foundation for her stage, only for us to be left sitting alone in the dark when her curtain finally closed.

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Journalist And Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Dead At 92

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