Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to expose club conditions
In 1963 Gloria Steinem took a job as a Playboy Bunny at the New York club and wrote up what she saw, detailing how the women were treated and the sexual demands placed on them. The exposé briefly cost her assignments, but Hugh Hefner responded by dropping mandatory gynecological exams for Bunnies.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, Steinem spent part of her childhood in a trailer from which her father ran a roving antiques business. Her mother had suffered a breakdown before Gloria's birth and spent long spells in sanatoriums; after her parents separated in 1944, ten-year-old Gloria stayed in Toledo with her. She later said the way employers and doctors dismissed her mother first showed her how society failed women. Her paternal grandmother Pauline had been the first woman elected to Toledo's Board of Education.
After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she went to India for two years on a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship and absorbed Gandhi's methods. Back home she directed the Independent Research Service, whose foundation backers were secretly funded by the CIA, and in 1960 became the first employee of Help! magazine. A 1962 Esquire piece on women forced to choose between career and marriage appeared a year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
Her 1969 article After Black Power, Women's Liberation made her a national figure. She co-founded Ms. magazine, and in 1971 both the National Women's Political Caucus, which trained women to run for office, and the Women's Action Alliance. In 1992 she helped create Take Our Daughters to Work Day, and in 2005 she co-founded the Women's Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan.
In 2015, alongside the Nobel Peace laureates Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee and other women peace activists, she travelled from Pyongyang across the Korean Demilitarized Zone into South Korea. She died on September 2, 2026.
Source: Gloria Steinem
