In 2010, I visited Gloria Steinem’s grand apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to ask her to write a foreword to an anthology about the Arab Spring that I’d edited. To my surprise, she accepted the pitch. Only 24 years old at the time, I didn’t fully understand why she so readily embraced the project.

I now do: the feminist writer and activist, who died on Wednesday aged 92, was a Cold War liberal and a patriot at heart. Her life’s project, while seemingly disruptive of the American domestic hearth, served Washington’s purposes abroad at a time when US foreign and domestic policy cohered much more closely than they do now.

The visit itself made for one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I was so nervous that my mouth felt like sandpaper as I walked up to her place, and the thought of having to speak sent more waves of anxiety rolling through my body. I was a Middle Eastern immigrant, a law student just figuring out how to dress well, with lots of “cultural literacy” still to master. She was an icon.

At my knock, Steinem opened her door dressed in a sort of animal-print catsuit. By then already in her late 70s, she still cut a striking figure. But this was leavened by a real warmth and hospitality that ran contrary to one side of her public image, especially on the American Right: the arch-feminist as a scold. Sensing my nervousness — it must’ve been impossible to miss — she thought of an immediate cure: “Can I get you a beer?” (Yes, yes, please!)

The liquid courage helped. And I managed to explain the gist of the anthology persuasively enough. It was a collection of essays on personal freedom written by young people from across the Middle East and North Africa. The book had been conceived before the outbreak of the Arab Spring but given a new urgency by those events.

I remember how, as I explained the repression of women in my native Iran, she compared their condition to the misogynist evils of the George W. Bush administration and the GOP. “Just like our Republicans” was something she said more than once. I managed not to roll my eyes or get into an argument.

In the end, though, she wrote a foreword that aligned with the democratising thrust of US Mideast policy at the time under both Bush and Barack Obama — this, even as she devoted a long and digressive section to how the Native Americans had practised proto-democracy and liberalism.

This was not at all a break with her career, which began with a stint at a nonprofit organisation funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Generations of harder Leftists have held that against her, but Steinem never apologised. As she put it in her memoir, published in 2015: “In my experience the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent, and honorable.”

Specifically, Steinem in the Fifties and Sixties was tasked by the agency with preaching “American values” — more or less the same values she championed at home — which in those days meant freedom and emancipation. She’d be dispatched to global arts-and-culture festivals that would otherwise have been dominated by the Communist Left. She injected a different image: one of America as cool and rebellious, compared to a Communist sphere that could be stodgy and even downright socially conservative. Steinem was an agent of American soft power.

That harmony — between America’s internal ferment and external aims — is now gone. Today, the values that Steinem championed are much more contested at home, with the backlash against the #GirlBoss, the rise of the tradwife, and the resurgence of religiosity and even traditionalism among sectors of Generation Z. But at a time when America was facing a very different set of ideological and geopolitical challenges, Steinem stepped up for the nation.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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