Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny. She was 29, already a journalist, and the assignment was supposed to be a lark — a quick exposé for Show magazine about working conditions at Hugh Hefner’s new Playboy Club in New York. She wore the corset. She served drinks. She smiled at men who tipped her based on how far she bent over.
The piece that came out wasn’t a lark. It documented wage theft, mandatory physical examinations that included internal checks for sexually transmitted diseases, and a work environment designed to make women decorative and disposable. Hefner called the article an attack. Steinem called it reporting. The Bunny piece followed her for decades — interviewers brought it up constantly, and she resented it, not because she was embarrassed but because nobody asked about the 400 other articles she’d written.
That’s the thing about talking to Steinem. She’d let you make your assumptions. Then she’d dismantle them so gently you’d think it was your idea.
The Rule She Broke
The convention was simple: women’s issues were soft news. They ran in the lifestyle section. They were covered by women, for women, and they never led the front page. Steinem didn’t argue that women’s issues deserved harder coverage. She argued that there was no such thing as a women’s issue — that reproductive rights were economic policy, that domestic violence was a criminal justice crisis, that the personal was political in the most literal sense available.
She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972. The first issue sold out all 300,000 copies in eight days. The letters column ran to 20,000 responses. What surprised editors wasn’t the volume — it was the content. Women wrote about things they’d never said aloud. Abuse. Illegal abortions. Workplace harassment in specific, named institutions. The magazine didn’t create the anger. It gave the anger an address.
What She’d Challenge About Your Life
Steinem wouldn’t lecture. That was her particular talent — a conversational style so disarming that people confessed things to her they hadn’t planned to say. She’d ask questions. Open-ended, quiet, patient questions. “When did you first learn you couldn’t do that?” “Who told you that was normal?” “What would you do if nobody was watching?”
She’d find the script. Everyone has one — the set of assumptions about what they’re allowed to want, who they’re supposed to be, what success looks like. Steinem spent fifty years identifying scripts and asking people whether they’d written them or inherited them. Most people, she found, had inherited them. Most people hadn’t noticed.
She was 66 when she got married for the first time — to David Bale, father of Christian Bale. She’d spent decades arguing that marriage was a form of legal ownership. When asked about the contradiction, she said: “I didn’t change. Marriage changed.” She meant it. The feminist who challenged the institution married on her own terms, in Oklahoma, officiated by a Cherokee friend, wearing jeans. David Bale died three years later. She never remarried.
The Discomfort
Talking to Steinem isn’t always comfortable. She has a way of making you examine things you’d rather leave alone. Not with force — with attention. She pays attention to things most people skim past. The word choices. The framing. The assumptions embedded in the question itself.
She’d hear you say “working mother” and she’d ask why nobody says “working father.” She’d hear you say “she’s so ambitious” and she’d want to know why that word sounds different when applied to a woman. These aren’t gotcha moments. She’s genuinely curious about the architecture of assumptions — the invisible scaffolding that holds social norms in place.
She traveled constantly. India in her twenties — two years, a formative experience she credits with teaching her to listen before speaking. Taxi driving across America in her sixties and seventies, meeting people in living rooms and VFW halls, doing what she called “talking circles” where the only rule was that everyone spoke and everyone listened.
She’d want to hear your story. All of it. And then she’d tell you which parts you’d been taught to leave out — and why those were the most important parts.
The woman who spent fifty years asking questions most people were afraid to answer is still asking them.
Talk to Gloria Steinem — she’ll listen longer than you expect. That’s when the real conversation starts.