Subject Area

History, Humanities

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Gloria Steinem became one of the most visible feminists of her generation because two political inheritances — postcolonial India and the Cold War liberal United States — converged in a single career. In 1957 and 1958, on a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship, Steinem spent eighteen months in India, where she moved from elite intellectual circles in Delhi to Gandhian and Sarvodaya peace work in the villages of Ramnad. Walking with Bhoodan fieldworkers through caste-riot-stricken communities, she absorbed a repertoire of organizing practices — listening across difference, lateral and leaderless structure, decision by consensus, and the conversion of personal testimony into political analysis — that she could not yet name. The dissertation traces these practices, through the fellowship reports she wrote at the time and the memoirs she wrote decades later, to the consciousness-raising methods that came to define American second-wave feminism. The standard scholarship locates those methods in the New Left and the civil rights movement; this study shows that they also reached American practice along a postcolonial route that has gone largely unexamined. The same Cold War infrastructure that carried Steinem to India also shaped her American career. The fellowship was an instrument of American soft power; the Independent Research Service that recruited her in 1959 to counter Soviet influence at the Vienna and Helsinki youth festivals was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency; and the magazines, party-reform commissions, and media fortunes that underwrote her rise were institutions of Cold War liberalism. Drawing on archives at Smith College, the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Open Society Archives, and elsewhere, the dissertation reads Steinem’s Indian formation and her Cold War recruitment not as two separate phases but as one story told from two angles. Her professional marginalization as a woman in American journalism was not an obstacle to that recruitment but its condition. Second-wave American feminism, this dissertation concludes, did not emerge despite the Cold War. It emerged through it — its signature method made in India, its institutions made in the Cold War United States.

Degree Date

Summer 8-4-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Clements Department of History

Advisor

Crista DeLuzio

Second Advisor

Jeffrey Engel

Third Advisor

Thomas Knock

Fourth Advisor

David Engerman

Number of Pages

331

Format

.docx

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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