by Ruth Rosen
Why did both Friedan and the Redstockings—embracing such different politics—attack Steinem? One answer is that the relationship between the CIA and youth organizations still remained very murky. They could confidently smear Steinem precisely because so little was known. In the aftermath of the Ramparts exposé, there was, according to political scientist Karen Paget, “a ‘deal’ made between the National Student Association leaders and the CIA. Knowledgeable NSA officials and the agency agreed to confirm the relationship but to provide no details.” Both Friedan and the Redstockings also seemed motivated by their ardent belief that FBI-paid lesbians and Ms. magazine, even if evidence was not at hand, had somehow conspired to take over their movement.
In Friedan’s case, her obsession with Steinem also seemed driven by rivalry. She undoubtedly felt upstaged. She had ignited the American women’s movement. She had named resentments that had been invisible. It must have pained her to watch the media cast her rival as a leader. Like Cinderella’s older sister, Friedan had to watch as the media lavished attention on the telegenic Steinem. And she may have found it more than she could bear. “I was no match for [Steinem],” she wrote with some bitterness, “not only because of the matter of looks—which somehow paralyzed me—but because I don’t know how to manipulate, or deal with manipulation myself”—an assertion that many feminists found odd and without much credibility.25
The Redstockings, for their part, believed that a CIA-funded conspiracy of lesbians and liberals had taken over their radical movement. Kathie Sarachild had long accused Ms. magazine (along with Newsweek, the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, and several well-known authors) of working to eliminate the real voice of radical feminism. Steinem, using the slick magazine she founded, had turned herself into a star. Sarachild and Hanisch felt that they had never received proper appreciation and recognition for their work. And they were right. Hanisch had coined the slogan “The personal is political,” and Sarachild had “invented” the idea of “consciousness-raising,” and promoted the idea of the small group as a way to create a new kind of movement. Yet they were not household names. In addition, Sarachild was perhaps miffed that Ms. had offered her an advance to write a book on consciousness-raising and then had decided to publish its own anthology on the subject. Although Ms. allowed her to keep the advance, Sarachild may have felt betrayed.
In the view of Sarachild, Hanisch, and Friedan, distinctive if very different leaders whose originality shaped the first decade of the movement, Steinem didn’t deserve to be viewed as a leader. Yet, with her good looks, intelligent journalism, and successful magazine, she seemed suspiciously effective in mobilizing women around feminist causes. Nonetheless, to call Steinem a tool of the CIA, as biographer Carolyn Heilbrun has pointed out, was a “terrible accusation indeed. The Redstockings made a very clever move against a woman they perceived as having usurped their movement and the celebrity owed them.” After years of careful research on Steinem’s life, Heilbrun found the accusations to be “without substance and often ridiculous” and concluded that “there is simply no evidence to substantiate the Redstockings’ reckless charges.” Heilbrun eloquently summed up both what happened to Steinem and the more general phenomenon of trashing in the women’s movement: “Just as men victimize the weak member of their group, women victimize the strong one. Why this is so is not entirely clear, but let us hope it disappears before the next wave of feminism crashes into women’s lives.”26
The movement only became more contentious as time went on. At a national women’s studies meeting in the late 1970s, I sat stunned as every group created a caucus, and every caucus demanded to be heard. I saw Jewish, Islamic, Christian, Chicana, African-American, disabled, fat, and anorexic women, along with white lesbian feminists and Third World lesbian feminists, fight each other for visibility. As the day went on, I grew increasingly despondent. True, most of these women had recently discovered how much other women and men had silenced them. True, they desired legitimacy and acceptance—for their color, their sexual preference, their religion, their disabilities, or some combination of several of these. But victims were turning into heroines, while the idea of difference was becoming more seductive than solidarity. In the process, in one guise or another, women rather than men were becoming the new enemy.
All the makings of a paranoid movement, in which every group was dedicated to advancing a particular aspect of women’s lives—religion, race, ethnicity, disability, appearance, and sexual orientation—were now in place. One could easily imagine that there were enemies out there, ready to take you down. All that was needed was a basis for that paranoia and that, in part, was provided by the FBI, along with other surveillance agencies. Soon, it became difficult to sort out paranoia from reality, imaginary enemies from perfectly real ones. And, to the best of our knowledge, the government did conspire, quite consciously, to heighten that atmosphere of fear.
THE FBI
Both feminists and the FBI suffered from legitimate fears as well as paranoia. Activists often imagined that agents were everywhere and that the FBI viewed the women’s movement as a serious threat to “national security.” But the truth, as always, was far more complicated. The women’s movement was dangerous, but not in the way the FBI assumed, and FBI informants were everywhere, but they were not usually the most visible or obvious women.
Sometimes research ends up confirming your worst fears. The extent of FBI infiltration of movements of the sixties is by now well documented. Younger women in the New Left had firsthand acquaintance with the FBI’s infiltration of civil rights groups, SDS, the Black Panther Party, the Native American Movement, the Yippies, and many other protest groups. They knew the Bureau’s methods: create division and dissension. Spread false rumors about members. Plant bogus evidence to discredit leaders. Utilize agent provocateurs. Send false letters to intensify fear of infiltration. In an internal memo dated July 5, 1968, the FBI listed twelve suggestions for destroying the New Left. One was to take “advantage of personal conflicts or animosities existing between New Left leaders.” Another suggestion was that agents should create “the impression that certain New Left leaders are informants for the Bureau or other law enforcement agencies.” The memo also suggested that agents “consider the use of cartoons, photographs and anonymous letters which will have the effect of ridiculing the New Left. Ridicule is one of the most potent weapons which we can use against it.” Above all, “whenever possible, agents and informers were to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize specific individuals and groups.”27
Through close coordination with local police—sometimes called Red Squads—as well as the press, universities, businesses, churches, and trade union officials, the FBI successfully cast suspicion on leaders and helped destroy their leadership and credibility. These young women also knew how FBI informers had pushed activists in the black power movement toward sectarian divisions and, in the case of the Black Panthers and other black nationalist groups, into deadly rivalries.
Older female activists—those who had been targeted as Communists or identified as labor organizers or members of Women Strike for Peace—were not at all surprised that the FBI would scrutinize their actions. During the fifties, the FBI had hounded these women, followed their children to school, interrogated their neighbors and coworkers, and often constituted nearly half the membership of some organizations.
Still, in my wildest flights of paranoia I never imagined the extent to which the FBI spied on feminists or how many women did the spying. We may never know the full extent of this infiltration, what damage it caused, or how it affected the trajectory of American feminism. Surprisingly, no significant examination of this secret has yet taken place.
Surveillance of the women’s movement began as part of the Cointelpro program, an FBI domestic surveillance program begun in 1956. In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover redefined the Cointelpro mission: “It was to ‘neutralize’ the effectiveness of civil rights, New Left, antiwar and black liberation groups.”
Between 1968 and 1971, Cointelpro infiltrated both the New Left and the women’s movement. Although the FBI did not officially employ women agents until after Hoover’s death in 1972, its regional offices paid dozens—more likely hundreds—of female informants to infiltrate the women’s movement. FBI director Hoover remained adamant that constant surveillance of the women’s movement be maintained, in his words, for the “internal security of the nation.” Some New Left activists, women as well as men, assumed that the FBI had decided to create a feminist movement as a wedge that would splinter the antiwar movement. Although the FBI certainly worked to exacerbate differences between existing movements and between factions within those movements, there is not much evidence—at least, not yet—that the Bureau spearheaded a campaign to create an autonomous women’s movement.28
But that doesn’t mean no one in the Bureau thought about this possibility. In a memo to the director in 1969, a special FBI agent in San Francisco wrote to Hoover, “The women’s movement could be viewed as subversive to the entire younger New Left and revolutionary movement as they have proven to be a divisive and factionalizing factor. . . . It could well be recommended as a job for a counter-intelligence movement to weaken the revolutionary movement.”29 What Hoover did with this suggestion is not yet known.
Americans first heard about the Cointelpro program and learned something of its scope when a “Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI” broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in March 1971, removed secret files, and subsequently leaked them to the press. Soon after Cointelpro was exposed, several agents resigned and blew the whistle on the agency’s crimes against ordinary citizens. After Hoover’s death in 1972, the agency issued a public apology and vowed to reform itself. In 1975, Senator Frank Church held congressional hearings that further exposed the program and confirmed some of the New Left’s and women’s movement’s worst nightmares.30
The Church Committee interviewed FBI officials and agents who had orchestrated the infiltration of the women’s movement—not only in Chicago, New York, and Berkeley, but in Kansas City, Columbus, Lawrence, Cleveland, Seattle, Gainesville, Florida, and dozens of other small towns and cities all over the country. Here is an excerpt of Senator Church’s interrogation of James B. Adams, associate director of the FBI Intelligence Division, about the infiltration of the women’s movement.
The Chairman: Now, the last few questions I would like to put to you, Mr. Adams, have to do with some confusion in my mind concerning the purpose of the FBI in monitoring the Women’s Liberation Movement. What was the purpose of that surveillance? Why were you involved in monitoring that movement?
Mr. Adams: It was basically, as I recall, I have not reviewed the files, but from the information that I have acquired, it would indicate there were groups that were believed to be infiltrating and attempting to exert control over it.
The Chairman: But you never did find, did you, that the Women’s Liberation Movement was seriously infiltrated, influenced or controlled by Communists?
Mr. Adams: No . . . It was a very independent group.
The Chairman: Well, we are trying to keep the country that way.
Mr. Adams: That’s right. . . .
The Chairman: I call your attention to this [“Origins, Aims and Purposes,” a description of the women’s liberation movement in Baltimore, Maryland] because it seems to typify the whole problem of this generalized kind of surveillance over the activities of American citizens. Here is the report. If you read with me this paragraph:
The women’s liberation movement in Baltimore Md. began during the summer of 1968. There was no structure or parent organization. There were no rules or plan to go by. It started out as a group therapy session with young women who were either lonely or confined to the home with small children, getting together to talk out their problems. Along with this they wanted a purpose and that was to be free women from the humdrum existence of being only a wife and mother. They wanted equal opportunities that men have in work and in society. They wanted their husbands to share in the housework and in raising their children. They also wanted to go out and work in what kind of jobs they wanted and not be discriminated [against] as women.
Now, can you find anything in that report that in any way suggests that these women were engaged in improper or unlawful activity? . . . I think you would agree with me that women do have the right to get together to talk about humdrum existence and equal opportunities with men and equal opportunities for work in society, don’t they? That is not a subversive activity.
Mr. Adams: Well, but . . . interwoven with the Women’s Liberation Movement goal for equal rights for women, there was an advocacy certainly of militancy and violence in achieving their goals.
The Chairman: I am told by the staff that . . . the only other thing . . . was that those women had affiliation with an organization that had protested the war in Baltimore.
Mr. Adams: I think there were some other items.
Mr. Chairman: That is the only other association that we have been able to determine. Apparently the Women’s Liberation Movement is no longer under suspicion by the FBI and the case has been closed. What happens when the case is closed? Are those women’s names still left in the files? Are they forevermore contained?
Mr. Adams: Yes.
The Chairman: In the system?
Mr. Adams: Yes.31
The FBI’s view of the women’s movement is summarized in a 1973 report listing the national women’s newspaper Off Our Backs as “ARMED AND DANGEROUS—EXTREME.”32
Why did the FBI spend so many years infiltrating the women’s movement? In the middle of the Cold War, Hoover never stopped looking for Communists. The FBI believed, as did many activists, that the Socialist Workers’ Party was trying to infiltrate and influence the movement. They therefore decided to infiltrate the infiltrator. Some of these women, activists in the Left and antiwar movements, held support rallies for black power groups, and even met with leaders and peace activists from North Vietnam. Hoover also believed that any new movement, in the midst of this explosive period, needed to be followed, understood, and contained.
Who were the women who spied on other women? Their names are blackened out in the Bureau’s files. But the Church Committee’s documents and exhibits, while clearly sanitized, still provide a glimpse into the bizarre culture in which female informers reported to (male) field agents and to Hoover. From the New York regional office came this report to the director:
On DELETED [19]69, informant DELETED who has furnished reliable information in the past, advised that a WLM meeting was held on DELETED at DELETED in New York City. Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise. According to this informant, these women are mostly concerned with liberating women from this “oppressive society.” They are mostly against marriage, children and other states of oppression caused by men. Few of them, according to the informant, have had political backgrounds. The informant states that a mailing list was passed around at the meeting. . . . On DELETED [19]69, informant advised that the WLM is only interested in changing abortion laws and birth control. They advocate free abortions for everyone and widespread information on birth control. According to the informant, women at the meeting on DELETED [19]69 state they are not revolutionaries and would not help anyone in a revolution until the oppression of women was solved first and completely.33
You’d think that such a tepid report would have ended further activity. But despite repeated reports that the women’s movement posed no threat to national security, the FBI spent considerable resources to infiltrate feminist organizations. Regional offices recruited “volunteer” female informers, infiltrators, and observers. These informants sent back reports about radio interviews with local feminists, clipped stories that mentioned the names of feminists or protest activities in the mainstream and alternative press, joined feminist reading groups, and even sat through consciousness-raising groups. They collected fl
yers, the agendas and minutes of meetings, position papers, and conference programs. The FBI also targeted any “collective” that lived in a commune, created a community child care center, or helped set up or run a health clinic, all of which seemed suspiciously like Communist institutions.
A surprising number of regional field agents thought the FBI’s scrutiny of the women’s movement was unwarranted. In May 1969, the San Francisco Regional Office reported to the Bureau in Washington, D.C., that the women’s liberation movement “was mainly concerned with male chauvinism and didn’t seem to require any investigation.” In April 1970, that office again reported that “the Women’s Liberation Movement in the San Francisco area is a broad socio-political movement without any central direction or control from any organized group. It does not appear appropriate to conduct an investigation.” The WLM appeared to have legitimate grievances and didn’t seem to be involved in subversive activities. A few months later, the San Francisco office added, “In the view of this regional office, such surveillance was not warranted.”34