Gloria Steinem: Cold Warrior, patriot, and spy

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.