When Gloria Steinem passed away at ninety-two, the media machine immediately whirred into motion, churning out the expected hagiographies. We were fed the standard narrative: the aviator glasses, the Playboy Bunny undercover exposé, the founding of Ms. Magazine, the eternal icon of second-wave feminism. The lazy consensus says she was the undisputed architect of modern women's liberation, a saintly figure who marched us out of the 1950s kitchen and into the boardroom.
It is a tidy story. It is also dangerously incomplete.
The uncomfortable truth that polite obituary writers refuse to touch is that Steinem’s brand of elite, media-friendly feminism won the cultural battle while losing the economic war for the majority of women. By focusing the movement’s lens primarily on individual access, symbolic representation, and corporate ladder-climbing, she helped anchor a system that traded collective welfare for personal prestige.
I have watched institutions burn millions of dollars chasing diversity optics while the foundational support structures for working-class women—affordable childcare, robust labor protections, and universal healthcare—remained completely out of reach. Steinem’s legacy is a masterclass in how radical economic critique was successfully defanged, packaged into glossy magazine ads, and sold back to us as empowerment.
The Myth of the Independent Icon
Look closely at the founding mythology of Ms. Magazine. It was supposed to be the voice of the grassroots. Yet, from its inception, it relied on corporate advertising and venture capital backing. It marketed liberation through consumerism. Buy this lipstick, wear these clothes, read this magazine, and you too are a liberated woman.
This approach completely bypassed the structural realities of class. A female CEO exploiting low-wage migrant labor is not a feminist victory; it is simply capitalism with a pantsuit. Steinem’s inner circle largely championed representation over redistribution. They fought for a seat at the table of an empire rather than asking whether the table itself was built on quicksand.
Consider the brilliant critique offered by labor organizers and socialist feminists decades ago: corporate feminism creates a steep hierarchy where a tiny fraction of women shatter the glass ceiling while millions are left to mop up the shards. Steinem rarely engaged with this critique in any meaningful way. Her framework assumed that if women occupied powerful positions, the trickle-down effect would liberate everyone else.
History has disproven that theory. The wealth gap between elite women and working-class women has exploded. The corporate boardroom is not a liberation camp.
Rewriting the Playbook for Modern Power
If we want to honor Steinem’s actual impact—both positive and negative—we have to stop treating her life as a sacred text and start treating it as a case study. The question is no longer how to get more women into executive suites. That battle was won thirty years ago, and look around. Rent is still unaffordable, childcare costs more than college tuition, and maternity leave in the United States remains an international embarrassment.
The real question we should be asking is why institutional feminism spent half a century mistaking visibility for liberation.
To fix this, we have to adopt a radically different operational model. Here is the unconventional playbook for dismantling structural inequality instead of just rearranging the deck chairs:
- Abandon corporate optics: Stop measuring progress by the percentage of female executives on a Fortune 500 board. Measure it by wage compression, union density among female-dominated professions, and access to subsidized social safety nets.
- Prioritize collective bargaining over individual advancement: Personal empowerment without collective leverage is just a nicer cage. Real power comes from solidarity, not self-branding.
- Decouple career from worth: True liberation means freeing people from the relentless grind of productivity worship, regardless of gender.
The Downside of the Contrarian Turn
Let us be entirely transparent about the risk here. Dismantling the Steinem narrative risks handing ammunition to anti-feminist actors who want to roll back hard-won civil rights protections entirely. That is the danger of any critique launched from the inside.
When you challenge the icons, bad actors often try to co-opt your arguments for regressive ends. But avoiding the truth out of fear that the wrong people might weaponize it is intellectual cowardice. Steinem herself was fearless in her youth; she would have despised the fragile, uncritical canon her name has been reduced to.
We do justice to history only when we look at its architects with clear eyes, acknowledging their blind spots and refusing to let their limitations dictate our future.
The ticker tape has settled. The tributes have stopped rolling. The real work begins the moment we admit that the icons we built were only ever human, and their strategies were never enough.
Stop waiting for a charismatic face in aviator glasses to save you. Build power where you stand.
