Who Really Funded Feminism — And Why

I’ve long wondered how the feminist wall was built. On the surface it looked like a grassroots uprising, but something about it felt orchestrated. What explained that difference? I first found clues in Frank Zepezauer’s The Feminist Crusades, a book that details the massive amounts of money funneled into the movement. That revelation opened my eyes. Later, when I dug deeper into who funded feminism and why, the picture sharpened even more. This post follows that money trail.

When people think of second-wave feminism, they picture grassroots energy: women in living rooms sharing stories, marching in the streets, pushing for change. And that ​may have been true — at first. But by the mid-1970s, something shifted. Feminism stopped being mainly a movement of street-level activists and began morphing into a network of credentialed scholars, policy advocates, and well-funded NGOs.

That transformation didn’t just happen on its own. It was fueled by very large amounts of money — from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie, later MacArthur, Open Society (George Soros), and even the federal government.

The Money Trail

Ford Foundation

In the 1970s alone, the Ford Foundation poured tens of millions into feminist causes. Mariam Chamberlain, a program officer at Ford, was the architect of much of this push. Between 1971 and 1981, she directed $5 million to seed women’s studies programs, feminist publishing, and policy research. At a time when universities were hesitant to invest in such programs, Ford’s grants provided the startup funds that allowed women’s studies departments to take root and flourish. Ford also funded feminist publishing houses and think tanks, creating both a scholarly and popular pipeline for feminist ideas.

By 1979, Ford’s total commitments to women’s initiatives had reached $20 million — a staggering figure for the era (over $85 million today). Most important, Ford chose which voices received institutional backing, embedding them in universities where they gained lasting authority.

The result: women’s studies did not simply emerge as a spontaneous movement. It was engineered into permanence by foundation money. Ford’s investments created credentialed authority that cemented feminist narratives in academia and policy circles for generations. No parallel funding ever launched men’s or boys’ studies.

Fast-forward to today: in 2021, Ford pledged another $420 million globally to advance gender equality in the wake of COVID — proof that its role in shaping gender discourse has remained consistent for half a century. And Ford was hardly alone. Other foundations followed the same path, pouring resources into feminist initiatives while ensuring elite philanthropy shaped the direction of the movement.

Rockefeller Foundation

Rockefeller’s contributions were smaller but highly symbolic. In 1970, NOW received a $15,000 grant (about $120,000 in today’s dollars) — modest in size but significant as a signal of elite endorsement. More broadly, Rockefeller had long funded population control and family planning programs, linking feminist calls for reproductive freedom to demographic priorities embraced by elites.

Carnegie Corporation

Carnegie’s support was less visible but reinforced the same pattern. It funded education and research initiatives that positioned women more strongly in professional life and academia, helping create the pipeline that legitimized feminist priorities.

U.S. Government

Washington soon joined the effort. The 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston was funded with $5 million in federal money. Title IX (1972) and the Women’s Educational Equity Act (1974) came with federal dollars to advance feminist reforms in education and public life.

The government also invested heavily in domestic violence services. The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA), first enacted in 1984, provided grants for shelters, hotlines, and prevention programs. Since 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been a cornerstone, initially authorizing $1.6 billion for investigation, prosecution, and services. In FY 2024 alone, the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women awarded over $690 million in grants. A conservative estimate suggests that since 1994, the U.S. has spent more than $15 billion on violence-against-women programs.

This is striking given that men are far more likely to be victims of violence, yet the government has spent very little on addressing their needs.

Ms. Foundation for Women

Co-founded by Gloria Steinem in 1972, the Ms. Foundation quickly became one of the most influential clearinghouses for feminist philanthropy. Its role was not simply to raise money but to re-grant foundation dollars in ways that seeded and sustained feminist activism at the grassroots level.

By the 1990s, the foundation was channeling millions to women’s centers, domestic violence shelters, reproductive rights campaigns, and academic initiatives. Grants often ranged from $5,000 to $50,000 — small enough to be considered “community grants” but large enough to keep organizations alive and aligned with the broader feminist project.

The flow continues today. Ford, for example, awarded the Ms. Foundation a $4 million BUILD grant (2018–22) to strengthen its capacity. Over time, Ms. became the bridge between elite funders and grassroots activists, shaping the movement by deciding which groups thrived and which withered.

United Nations

The UN has played a central role in globalizing feminist priorities, not just through declarations but through money. The 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City and the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) set the stage by creating institutional frameworks for feminist advocacy. These initiatives legitimized women’s rights as a matter of international governance, with governments encouraged — and often pressured — to align their domestic policies with UN resolutions.

Funding soon followed. In 1976, the UN established UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) as a dedicated channel for financing women’s programs. By the 1990s, UNIFEM was distributing tens of millions annually to NGOs, training programs, and policy projects across the developing world. In 2010, UNIFEM was folded into UN Women, which has since become the central UN agency for gender equality.

UN Women operates the Fund for Gender Equality, a global grantmaking mechanism that has disbursed more than $120 million to over 140 programs in 80 countries since 2009. Its annual budget has grown steadily, reaching around $500 million in recent years, sourced from UN member states, private donors, and corporate partnerships. Much of this money goes directly to feminist NGOs, advocacy campaigns, and government programs designed to advance gender-mainstreaming policies.

The UN has also embedded feminism into global development frameworks. Gender equality became one of the Millennium Development Goals (2000) and was carried forward into the Sustainable Development Goals (2015), ensuring that aid flows and donor governments aligned their budgets with feminist priorities.

By contrast, the UN has never created an equivalent agency, trust fund, or global development goal for men and boys. Issues such as male suicide, fatherlessness, and educational decline remain almost entirely absent from UN programming. The imbalance is clear: while feminism was woven into the fabric of global governance and heavily resourced, men’s issues were left invisible.

MacArthur & Open Society

By the 1990s and 2000s, feminism had gone global, with major foundations exporting their influence abroad.

The MacArthur Foundation invested heavily in reproductive health and rights across the developing world. In India, its grants helped expand networks of reproductive-health NGOs; in Nigeria, it underwrote campaigns to integrate feminist perspectives into national health policy. By 2000, MacArthur had committed hundreds of millions globally, positioning itself as a leading private funder of reproductive rights.

The Open Society Foundations, created by George Soros, became another major engine of international feminist philanthropy. In Africa, OSF financed the African Women’s Development Fund, which has since distributed tens of millions to local feminist groups. In Latin America, OSF underwrote “gender justice” and LGBTQ+ campaigns. In Asia, it supported intersectional programs that tied feminism to poverty, ethnicity, and political repression.

Together, MacArthur and OSF globalized the feminist project. What began in the 1960s and 70s as domestic funding for women’s studies and advocacy had, by the 1990s and 2000s, expanded into a worldwide infrastructure of NGOs and policy centers. No comparable global investment was ever made for men or boys.

Melinda Gates (Pivotal Ventures)

In 2019, Melinda Gates announced through Pivotal Ventures a breathtaking pledge: $1 billion over ten years for women’s empowerment — the largest single philanthropic commitment of its kind. The money was designed to accelerate gender equality in the United States by funding women in leadership, promoting workplace equity, and strengthening feminist advocacy.

Through Pivotal Ventures, Gates directed funds into a wide array of partners, from advocacy groups and research institutes to corporate initiatives and grassroots organizations. The aim was to shift entire systems: how companies hire and promote, how political candidates are supported, and how cultural narratives about gender are shaped.

The scale of this investment effectively guaranteed feminist organizations a decade of unprecedented security and visibility. Yet no comparable billion-dollar commitment has ever been made for men or boys.

Conclusion

Taken together, the record is unmistakable. From Ford’s seeding of women’s studies, to the Ms. Foundation’s grassroots re-granting, to MacArthur and Open Society globalizing activism, and finally to Melinda Gates’s billion-dollar pledge, elite philanthropy has engineered and sustained feminism’s rise for more than half a century. Billions of dollars built the departments, advocacy networks, and NGOs that now define public conversation about gender.

Meanwhile, men’s and boys’ issues received virtually nothing. No major foundation seeded “men’s studies.” No billion-dollar pledge launched a global network for boys. The result is not just an imbalance in funding, but an imbalance in culture and policy: feminism is treated as the unquestioned voice on gender, while men’s struggles — from suicide and fatherlessness to educational decline — remain largely ignored.

Why They Gave So Much

It’s tempting to think these were simply acts of generosity. But foundations don’t write checks this big without a reason. Their motives were strategic:

• Population Control — Rockefeller and Ford had been pouring money into family planning since the 1950s. Funding feminism’s push for reproductive freedom advanced the goal of lower birth rates, especially among the poor and in the developing world.

• Labor Force Expansion — Encouraging women into higher education and careers expanded the labor pool, fueling economic growth and tax revenues.

• Cold War Soft Power — Supporting women’s rights projected America’s moral superiority over the USSR, where women’s workforce participation was touted as a socialist achievement.

• Shaping the Message — By funding universities, NGOs, and professional associations, foundations steered feminism toward credentialed scholarship and identity politics, and away from grassroots demands like wages for housework or critiques of capitalism. Men, once imagined as partners in reshaping family and work, were recast as obstacles. That framing made the movement more marketable and easier to manage.

• Global Development — By the 1990s, funding feminism had become part of development policy. Empowering women was reframed as “good governance” and a tool for stabilizing societies.

The Big Picture

So what happened? Feminism flourished — but only in the strands that aligned with elite agendas:

• reproductive rights as population control

• career advancement as labor force expansion

• women’s studies as cultural influence

• and men positioned as adversaries rather than allies

Meanwhile, more radical or working-class agendas — supporting families, addressing men’s challenges, critiquing capitalism — faded from view.

That’s what hundreds of millions of dollars do: amplify some voices while silencing others.

The takeaway: Feminism wasn’t simply a spontaneous cultural revolution. It was shaped, amplified, and institutionalized by massive foundation funding. The foundations didn’t just give money — they set the rules. Grants went only to those advancing elite priorities, with feminist leaders acting as distributors inside those boundaries. It was philanthropy as social engineering: slick, effective, and enduring.

Follow the money, and you’ll see: feminism was less a revolution from below than a project engineered from above.

Is the same thing happening today with men’s issues? Who gets grants? Large grants? From major foundations? It’s worth asking.

Men Are Good.

References

• Ford Foundation – Changing the game for women and girls (overview of Ford’s women’s initiatives)
  https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/the-future-is-hers/changing-the-game-for-women-and-girls

• Ford Foundation – $420 million commitment post-COVID to tackle gender inequality (2021)
  https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/ford-foundation-commits-420-million-to-tackle-gender-inequality-around-the-globe-post-covid-19

• Rockefeller Foundation – $1 billion Gender Fund announcement
  https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/leaders-launch-new-1bn-gender-fund-to-advance-global-equality-and-womens-leadership

• Open Society Foundations – $100 million commitment to feminist political mobilization (2021)
  https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-foundations-commit-100-million-to-support-feminist-political-mobilization-and-leadership

• Open Society Foundations – How we fund (overview of annual grants and impact investments)
  https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/how-we-work/how-we-fund

• African Women’s Development Fund – Wikipedia entry (grant history and funders)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Women%27s_Development_Fund

• Global Fund for Women – Wikipedia entry (grantmaking history, $100M+ since 1988)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Fund_for_Women

• UN Women – Fund for Gender Equality (global grantmaking mechanism)
  https://www.unwomen.org/en/trust-funds/fund-for-gender-equality

• Rockefeller Archive Center – Women, Activism, and Reproductive Health Philanthropy (MacArthur and others at the 1974 World Population Conference)
  https://resource.rockarch.org/story/women-activism-reproductive-health-philanthropy-1974-world-population-conference-bucharest

• Associated Press – Black Feminist Fund aims to raise $100 million, $35 million already secured
  https://apnews.com/article/7c545feeca154541f61118e4e45a85b2

• Melinda French Gates / Pivotal Ventures – Announces $1B Commitment to Advance Women’s Power Globally (May 2024) The Wall Street Journal+13Pivotal Ventures+13Pivotal Ventures+13

Part One - How Finland Faced Its Suicide Crisis Head-On

Part 1 of 3 in a series on what the world can learn from Finland’s suicide prevention efforts

In the United States, the conversation about male suicide is as predictable as it is shallow. “Men just won’t seek help,” we’re told. And that’s the end of it. Nothing more is asked, and nothing more is done.

But in the 1980s, Finland was facing a suicide crisis of its own. Suicide rates were among the highest in Europe, and the deaths were concentrated in a very particular group: men — often rural, middle-aged, isolated, and drinking too much.

Finland could have shrugged, as America does, and accepted that “men just won’t seek help.” Instead, they made a very different choice. They decided to find out, in painstaking detail, who was dying, where, and why.

The Scale of the Crisis

By the mid-1980s, the numbers were grim. Suicide had become one of Finland’s leading causes of death for working-age men. Rates had been climbing steadily since the 1960s, and by the 1980s they were among the worst in the developed world.

For a country that prided itself on being orderly, sober, and efficient, this was more than a statistical embarrassment — it was a national emergency.

In 1985, the Finnish Ministry of Health convened experts, psychiatrists, and policymakers. Their goal was clear: develop a national suicide prevention plan that would reduce suicides by 20% within ten years.

This was, at the time, a radical idea. No other country had attempted a national, research-based suicide prevention program on this scale.

But the Finns knew that to act wisely, they would first have to understand deeply. And that meant one thing: research.

A Radical First Step — Research Every Suicide

Most countries are content to look at suicide from a distance, through statistics. Age brackets, gender breakdowns, perhaps a line on a graph. Finland chose a different path.

In 1987, the government launched what became known as the Suicides in Finland 1987 study — a nationwide effort to examine, in intimate detail, every single suicide that occurred over the course of one year.

Not a sample. Not an estimate. Every case.

For each of the roughly 1,400 suicides, researchers conducted what’s called a psychological autopsy. They interviewed families, spoke to friends and neighbors, and combed through medical and police records. They asked hard questions: What was happening in this person’s life? Had they ever sought care? Were there early warning signs?

The project engaged hundreds of professionals across the country: doctors, social workers, police officers, even clergy. It was one of the most ambitious suicide research efforts ever attempted, and it immediately began to change the way Finns thought about the problem.

The findings were stark. Suicide in Finland was not a random scattering of tragedies. It clustered in specific groups:

• Middle-aged rural men, often farmers or hunters, living in isolation.

• Young men rejected from compulsory military service, who carried the stigma of “failure” at the very moment they were trying to establish their adult identity.

• Men with alcohol dependence, frequently untreated.

• People who had never had contact with mental health services at all.

For the first time, Finland could say not just how many suicides were happening, but who was dying, where, and under what circumstances.

This wasn’t abstract theory. It was a roadmap. And it set the stage for something even more unusual: a national plan to intervene, directly and specifically, in the lives of those most at risk.

The Provincial Lens

The brilliance of the Finnish project wasn’t just in collecting data — it was in how they used it.

Instead of keeping the results locked away in government reports or academic journals, the findings were handed back to the provinces. Each region received its own suicide profile: a detailed account of who in their community was dying, what patterns were visible, and where the weak points in support systems lay.

In one province, the data might highlight young men failing conscription. In another, middle-aged farmers drinking heavily and living alone. In yet another, the lack of follow-up care for suicide attempts.

These weren’t abstract numbers anymore. They were portraits of neighbors, colleagues, and fellow parishioners. And the responsibility was clear: suicide prevention would have to be tailored locally.

Provincial health officials, police, clergy, teachers, and even farmer’s associations were drawn into the effort. Instead of a purely top-down campaign dictated from Helsinki, Finland was building a network of local responses, each shaped by the community’s own data.

This was a crucial shift. Suicide wasn’t just a “psychiatric problem” to be handled in hospitals. It was a social and cultural problem too — one that touched schools, military bases, rural hunting clubs, and village churches.

By the early 1990s, Finland had something no other country had ever built: a nationwide, locally adapted suicide prevention strategy, grounded in evidence about real people in real places.

Why This Matters

What Finland did in the late 1980s was extraordinary.

Instead of throwing up their hands and sighing that “men just won’t seek help,” they went out and found the men who were dying. They studied the contexts of their lives, the patterns in their struggles, the systems that failed them.

By the early 1990s, Finland could point to its suicide crisis and say with precision:

• We know who is most at risk.

• We know where the deaths are happening.

• We know the social and cultural factors driving them.

This is the foundation of prevention. You cannot help people you refuse to see.

And here lies the striking contrast with the United States. To this day, our suicide surveillance is patchy, fragmented, and often superficial. We rarely break down the data in meaningful ways, and even when we do, we almost never follow it with targeted action. Middle-aged men in rural communities — by far the group most at risk — remain largely invisible in our prevention systems.

Finland chose another path. They chose to look directly at the problem, however uncomfortable. And that choice gave them a roadmap for action.

Coming Next: From Research to Action

Research alone does not save lives. But in Finland, research was only the beginning.

The findings from the 1987 study became the blueprint for one of the boldest public health experiments in the world: a nationwide suicide prevention strategy that would mobilize schools, churches, the military, the media, and even rural hunting clubs.

And it worked. Suicide rates, which had been climbing steadily, began to fall.

In the next post, we’ll look at how Finland took the data in hand and transformed it into practical, creative interventions — and how entire communities became part of the prevention effort. It should post a week from today.

Men Are Good.

In the late 1980s, Finland discovered something troubling. Among its highest-risk suicide groups were young men rejected from military service. At exactly the age when they were trying to prove themselves, they were branded as outsiders. Many spiraled into isolation, unemployment, and despair.

Finland’s response was striking. The Defense Forces worked with mental health groups, employment services, and ​therapists to catch these men before they fell. They created guidebooks for life after discharge. They launched projects like Young Man, Seize the Day to provide vocational training, community, and a renewed sense of belonging.

In other words: Finland looked at these young men — stigmatized, rejected, hurting — and asked, “What do they need to find a way back in?”

Contrast that with how our society treats another group of young men today: those labelled as “incels.”

Here too we see rejection, isolation, and despair. But instead of responding with empathy or practical support, the prevailing approach is ridicule. The media caricatures incels as “dangerous losers” or “ticking time bombs.” Academic articles often describe them as pathologies — not people. On social media, the word “incel” has become shorthand for contempt, a slur hurled at any man deemed awkward, unwanted, or out of step.

The result? We deepen the very isolation that fuels their pain.

This doesn’t mean excusing harmful behaviors, nor ignoring real risks. But if the only response to young men in despair is shame and hostility, then we are doing exactly the opposite of prevention.

Finland shows another way. It proves that when a society chooses to see its hurting men as human beings rather than problems, it can build supports that save lives.

The question is whether we are willing to do the same. Will we keep throwing rocks at young men already drowning in loneliness? Or will we, like Finland, build ladders out of despair — ladders made of belonging, opportunity, and care?

_________________________

Starting Monday, I’ll share a new three-part series on how Finland confronted a devastating suicide crisis — and what their success can teach us about helping men in pain, rather than mocking them.

I’d known for years that Finland had significantly reduced male suicide rates, but only recently did I dig into the details. After reaching out to the Finnish Embassy, I was connected with thr Finnish Health Dept who then introduced me to Dr. Timo Partonen, a researcher who lived through these efforts. He shared documents that tell the story in remarkable depth.

I’ve distilled that material into a series I think you’ll find eye-opening. Finland’s story is one of care, courage, and respect for men’s lives. My hat is off to them — and I hope we can learn from their example.