The lazy consensus on Gloria Steinem paints a neat, digestible portrait of an unstoppable icon who single-handedly handed women their freedom on a silver placard. Obituaries are overflowing with glowing tributes to her aviator glasses, her founding of Ms. Magazine, and her crusade for the Equal Rights Amendment. Every mainstream outlet is currently regurgitating the exact same sanitized narrative. It is comfortable. It is safe. And it completely misses the structural wreckage left in the wake of corporate-sponsored second-wave ideology.
We need to talk about what actually happened when the radical liberation politics of the late sixties got swallowed whole by the corporate machine. Steinem did not just pioneer a movement; she commercialized it. The moment feminism became a marketable lifestyle brand advertised in glossy pages next to perfume ads, the foundational objective shifted from dismantling systemic oppression to climbing up the very hierarchies built to exploit the working class.
The Corporate Co-Optation of Liberation
Let us look at the data. When second-wave feminism successfully pushed mass numbers of women into the corporate workforce during the 1970s and 1980s, the ruling class did not panic. They calculated. Doubling the labor pool did two things simultaneously: it stagnated wage growth by instantly flooding the market with fresh applicants, and it doubled household taxable income. Wall Street pulled off the greatest magic trick in economic history, convincing an entire generation that trading household autonomy for a forty-hour desk job under fluorescent lights was the ultimate emancipation.
Steinem herself was famously tied to institutions and funding mechanisms that favored polite, credentialed reform over structural class warfare. Imagine a scenario where the energy spent lobbying for glass-ceiling representation in boardrooms had instead gone toward universal childcare, guaranteed healthcare, and protections for domestic and service workers—the actual women holding up the socioeconomic floor. Instead, we got corporate empowerment workshops and lean-in rhetoric.
The myth of the self-made professional
The core falsehood peddled by mainstream cultural histories is that individual career advancement equals collective liberation. If a female venture capitalist exploits gig-economy laborers, her success is somehow celebrated as a feminist victory because of her chromosomes. This is not liberation; it is diversification of the oppressor class. Steinem's brand of cultural politics smoothed over these class contradictions, teaching generations to measure progress by how many women occupy seats at tables designed to extract surplus value from everyone else.
The Myth of Choice Feminism
Whenever someone points out the glaring contradictions of modern commercialized empowerment, the defensive fallback is always choice feminism. The logic goes like this: whatever a woman chooses to do is inherently feminist simply because she chose it.
This is intellectually bankrupt. By defining any action taken by a woman as empowering, the term loses all analytical utility. If choice equals liberation, then participating in oppressive systems becomes an act of rebellion. It turns consumerism into a political statement. Buying a luxury handbag marketed with feminist buzzwords does not smash the patriarchy; it funds a conglomerate's quarterly earnings report.
I have watched organizations blow millions of dollars on diversity initiatives that focus exclusively on optical representation while actively union-busting their frontline staff. The ideological groundwork for this corporate shell game was laid decades ago when cultural symbolism was prioritized over material redistribution.
What We Should Have Done Instead
Real progress requires looking past the comforting nostalgia of 1970s consciousness-raising groups and evaluating the cold ledger of outcomes. The material conditions for the average working-class woman have deteriorated over the last fifty years. Housing costs have outpaced wages, childcare consumes entire paychecks, and the expectation to "have it all" has simply translated into doing it all—maintaining a full-time career while shouldering the majority of domestic labor.
We do not need another retrospective celebrating how far we have come while ignoring how many people have been left behind by an economy that requires two incomes just to survive.
Stop buying the mythology. The icon is gone, but the structural failures of the movement she popularized remain our daily reality. Fix the material conditions, or keep celebrating empty symbols while the foundation crumbles.
