In 1963, a twenty-eight-year-old journalist named Gloria Steinem put on a bunny costume, stuffed the bodice with dry cleaner bags, and went to work at the New York Playboy Club. She was there to write an expose. She worked for eleven days as Bunny Marie, serving drinks, enduring the dress code that included mandatory three-inch heels and a corset so tight it left bruises, and documenting every humiliation. The article she published afterward did not just describe bad working conditions. It described a system designed to monetize female compliance while calling it glamour.

She Did Not Set Out to Become a Feminist Icon

Steinem spent her twenties as a freelance journalist writing about whatever paid. She covered fashion, celebrity profiles, political campaigns. She was smart, beautiful, and excellent at getting interviews. The industry treated her as a decorative asset. Editors assigned her lightweight stories and assumed she was content. She was not content. She was paying attention. Media historians at the Columbia Journalism School have documented that Steinem's early work already contained the observational precision that would define her later activism. She could see systems. She could see the way a culture organizes itself to benefit certain people at the expense of others, and she could describe that organization in language that made it visible to people who had never noticed it before. The Playboy Bunny piece was the first time her observations drew national attention. It was also the last time anyone mistook her for a lifestyle journalist.

Ms. Magazine Was Supposed to Fail

In 1971, Steinem cofounded Ms. Magazine, the first major American publication to treat feminist issues as mainstream news rather than niche interest. Every media executive she approached told her it would fail. Women, they said, did not want to read about politics. Women wanted recipes and beauty tips. The preview issue, inserted as a supplement in New York Magazine in January 1972, sold out in eight days. The first standalone issue sold out its entire press run of 300,000 copies. Research from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard has documented that Ms. received over 26,000 reader letters in its first month, many from women who said they had never seen their own experiences reflected in a magazine before. Ms. covered domestic violence, sexual harassment in the workplace, reproductive rights, and pay inequality decades before these topics appeared regularly in mainstream media. It ran a petition signed by fifty-three prominent women who stated publicly that they had had abortions, at a time when abortion was still illegal in most states. The petition included Steinem herself.

She Made Feminism Accessible and That Made Purists Uncomfortable

Steinem's critics came from both directions. Conservative opponents called her a radical. Radical feminists accused her of being too pretty, too media-friendly, too willing to work within existing systems rather than burning them down. She was simultaneously too extreme and not extreme enough, which is generally an indicator that you are doing something right. What Steinem understood instinctively was that movements succeed through persuasion, not through purity. She smiled on television. She wore jeans and aviator glasses. She dated famous men. She refused to perform the grim-faced severity that the culture expected from feminists, because she recognized that expectation was itself a trap designed to make feminism unappealing. Sociological research from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research found that Steinem's media presence in the 1970s and 1980s significantly increased self-identification as feminist among American women, particularly among women who had previously associated feminism with hostility toward men. She made the movement feel like an invitation rather than an accusation. She is in her nineties now. She still travels. She still speaks. She has spent sixty years telling the same truth in different ways: that the political is personal, that nobody is free until everybody is free, and that the revolution is not coming because it never left.