![]() ![]() ![]() ‘Boy oh boy, guess she told you!’ said one, and tweaked my tail as I walked away.” By then, it seems safe to say, Steinem’s feminist wheels were in motion. The exposé she published was hilarious and scathing: “’Please, sir,’ I said, and uttered the ritual sentence we had learned from the Bunny Father lecture: ‘You are not allowed to touch the Bunnies.’ His companions laughed and laughed. “Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” In 1963, a 29-year-old Steinem put her “pretty girl” status to clever use, going undercover as a Playboy bunny in New York’s Playboy club. ![]() What makes someone into a feminist in an age bereft of them? The come-to-consciousness moment might have happened in her student days-for instance, when she asked an admissions officer why her class didn’t have any black girls and he responded, “We have to be very careful about educating Negro girls because there aren’t enough educated Negro men to go around.” It might have come later when she was trying to make it as a journalist in New York: “You know how every year, there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer?” she heard a colleague remark, as though she wasn’t there. When Steinem graduated from college in 1956, “feminism” in America mainly referred to the finite struggle of 19th and early 20th century suffragettes to secure the vote, a movement that was by then triumphant and defunct. ![]()
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