Gloria Steinem, the queen bee of second-wave feminism, passed away at 92 in New York on September 2, prompting widespread reflections on how she changed the world. Meanwhile, Generation Z — born between 1997 and 2012 — is raising questions about a work-life balance that was lost along the way. The generation so cash-strapped that socialism looks like the only way out isn’t wrong for asking where things went wrong — but they may be grasping at the wrong straws in attempt to explain why.
Is it any accident that what started out as women’s liberation is now an economic necessity for most households? In Steinem’s youth, households depended on a single breadwinner. By the 1980s, it generally required two incomes. By her death, births not only in the U.S. but across the developed world had dipped below replacement rates — and for many young adults the nuclear family is now priced out of reach.
Steinem promised her generation that women could have it all. Now we know it was a promise no one could keep.
As a young journalist and Ms. Magazine co-founder, Steinem worked, at least for a time, with the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1967 she lavished praise on the CIA in a Washington Post interview in which she described the agency as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”
Steinem came to the fore in the midst of government-made headlines of an entirely different sort: One cannot forget, for example, the McCarthy era Red Scare and the FBI’s targeting of Americans on the left — civil rights leaders, COINTELPRO and Gov. Reagan’s war on the communist University of California Professor Angela Davis, among others.
Steinem herself expressed surprise that there were “good liberals” in government.
Given Steinem’s controversial reputation among her contemporaries, a CIA supportive of the radical left of its day may seem hard to reconcile. But perhaps we should not be surprised. Barrack Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, rose through the ranks despite voting for the Communist party in the 1970s. Steinem was also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
At the same time, perhaps we give Steinem too much credit. Even in the midst of a more conservative era in American culture, government had something to gain from sponsoring change. As women left home and hearth to join the workforce, it worked in favor of the rise of Big Government — essentially a doubling of the tax base, not to mention the trickle-down Big Business opportunities to cater to what morphed into the “greed is good” 1980s, the Yuppie generation, the suburban McMansion, the electronic babysitter (TV) and their “latchkey kids“.
Steinem’s activism was good for Wall Street. But Steinem apparently did not realize she was playing an unwitting part.
The point is that Women’s Liberation is not destroying the American family; it is trying to build a human, compassionate alternative out of its ruins.
GLORIA STEINEM, “LIVING THE REVOLUTION” (MAY 31, 1970)
If the Cold War impetus to out-perform the communists by offering Rosie the Riveter a full-time career after the war was the extent of CIA’s interest in Steinem, it would be noteworthy. But beneath it all, a much darker impetus was in play: In the 1960s and ‘70s, much hand-wringing occurred among experts and policymakers about overpopulation, with books like Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 Population Bomb and Henry Kissinger 1974 “Memorandum 200” on population control, emblematic of the angst.
Far from stale policy discussions, these fears accompanied real-world harms, such as the often-overlooked forced sterilization of “unfit” women across the Western world, a practice that continued largely unimpeded right up to the dawn of Roe v. Wade.
It may seem we have come a long way from then to now, but ideas rarely die as much as evolve.
Recall that Black Lives Matter — founded by self-described “trained Marxists” — had a mission statement referring to dismantling the nuclear family, while explicitly elevating alternative lifestyles.
It’s no accident that the two go hand-in-hand.
This is the America Generation X came of age into: The social justice component was for public consumption. The policy component was not. Hence, the 1960s revolutionized not only women in the workforce but family planning; the 1990s brought into focus the gay rights movement; the mid 2000s saw the mainstreaming of transgenderism, and now an emergent effort to normalize “Minor Attracted Persons” threatens to eclipse the former in the coming decade.
At first blush, these may seem like unrelated trends. But they all have one thing in common: Fewer people, in aggregate, identified with or living in traditional households. Meanwhile, a collision of economic and cultural realities threatens the nuclear family, regardless. (The phenomena even has a name: Dual Income, No Kids or “DINK“).
The end result is already upon us: The developed world shares in an unfolding demographic crisis as baby boomers age out of the workforce with too few young-and-upcoming families to replace them. In the U.S., alone, birthrates have fallen 23 percent since 2007. Between 2020 and 2025, people aged 65 and older outnumbered children aged five and under worldwide for the first time in recorded history. This marks a demographic “tipping point” that arrived earlier than experts anticipated, per a new U.S. Census Bureau report.
Economic collapse is the price of population collapse.
If Steinem had the backing of the CIA while spearheading the culture battlefront of her time, one can infer that there may be some degree of CIA-backing within the LGBTQIA++ movement. If so, such support may not be in good faith. Fears about overpopulation, after all, have not gone away. Instead, they have undergone rebranding: “Global warming” is now “climate change” — euphemisms for the core issue of managing limited resources in view of human impacts on the planet.
Social justice narratives have evolved too.
One need only look to the North where Canada’s universal healthcare ultimately gave way to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). For all the public reassurances that it would be reserved for the terminally ill, the debate rather rapidly evolved to whether, without parental consent, “mature children” and people facing intractable hardships, such as homelessness, should qualify for euthanasia too.
Steinem’s CIA connections were ultimately exposed. And yet policymakers are still very much stakeholders in the culture wars.
To be sure, one can see why such movements are often successful: Women did yearn for flexibility and recognition; gays really did want the right to marry, and a percentage of gender dysphoric adults are probably “born that way”. But what we also see with the benefit of hindsight is that government is hardly a neutral bystander and the so-called grassroots is rarely organic.
For every one problem this invisible hand solves, how many more unintended consequences does it create?
Perhaps nothing is more ironic and under-acknowledged about Steinem’s legacy than the realization that “freedom isn’t free”. However one defines the sexual revolution, tens of millions of abortions over 50+ years inevitably plays an ongoing role in the demographic crisis that now threatens to unravel the heavily indebted global economy at an unprecedented scale.
While fewer humans may ease natural resource burdens in absolute terms, demographic collapse promises only a plummeting standard of living. And that begs another question: To what end? Baby boomers were followed by successive waves of smaller families, even as the relative wealth and comfort of a dual income household transformed into another kind of economic servitude with the ratcheting up of bigger and more ambitious governments and their transnational monopolist-globalist enablers.
This is not the capitalism ordinary people had in mind.
While the progressive side decries Big Business and the conservative side faults Big Government, what neither seems to fully grasp is that one does not exist at scale without the other. We live under the inflationary weight of high debts and crony capitalism in part because our would-be liberators fueled it. By focusing so heavily on the marketplace, parts of second-wave feminism inadvertently devalued the non-monetary aspects of care, community, and nurturing. This drove a cultural shift where staying home to raise children was sometimes looked down upon as “not real work” because it fails to generate a paycheck. The corporate economy happily welcomed millions of new workers (and taxpayers) while continuing to avoid fixing the underlying crisis of childcare and work-life balance — even as the broader culture became increasingly hostile toward traditional values.
At best it can be said that Steinem’s vision created unintended consequences. Alternately, it could be argued that Uncle Sam was duly impressed when WWII-era brides rose to the challenge and proved their economic worth on the production lines while holding down the fort on the home front. In that case, Steinem, Betty Friedman and others were as much accomplices to a clandestine albeit seductive effort to sour women on domestic life.
While we may never know where the activism stops and the propaganda begins, demographic reality speaks for itself: When we are told it is a “conspiracy” to note that it did not require a formal adoption of China’s “One Child” policy to arrive at a demographically precarious place — that by means of moving cultural norms and goalposts we have managed to favor a childless future — one must take such criticisms in stride. For one day a new generation will look back on us — and they will be far less disinclined to lift the veil on our taboos.
Yes, we had our liberation. And now the tab has come due.
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SOURCES
Women’s liberation movement and Ms. Magazine co-founder, dead at 92 | New York Post
The World Is Running Out of People—and the Next 40 Years Could Determine the Fate of Humanity | Popular Science
How to prepare America for demographic decline | George W. Bush Institute