One of the most iconic moments in Gloria Steinem's career was one she struggled to come to terms with. In May 1963, the feminist activist published the first part of her undercover Playboy exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale.”
She spent 11 days working undercover as a bunny in Manhattan's Playboy Club and documenting her experience. Her reporting lifted the lid on life inside Hugh Hefner's empire. Instead of glitz and glamour, her reporting revealed a world of misogyny and exploitation, where women were frequently underpaid, objectified, violated and harassed.
Bunnies, she said, also suffered physically from pouring themselves into tiny too tight costumes and spending hours wearing towering heels. They had to be mindful not to rack up any offenses, she revealed.
The workers would be fined if their tails were dirty, their satin ears crooked. The women were also forced into mandatory blood tests and gynecological exams, practices Hefner stopped in his clubs following the article's publication.
Steinem died peacefully at home on Wednesday, Sept. 2, at age 92.
While she received multiple journalism awards and literary prizes throughout her life, the bunny story, published by Show magazine, was the one she could not shake.
At first she felt trapped by her investigation, which she cited as the reason editors would not take her seriously later in her career, though she later embraced her sexualized undercover stint for the change it sparked inside Hefner's kingdom.
Steinem couldn't shake the bunny story
The bunny story and images of Steinem in her bunny uniform would long haunt her.
In a 2011 interview with ABC News Steinem called it "a professional error of gigantic proportions because I was just beginning to be assigned serious pieces and suddenly I was a bunny."
She noted that the story, which sparked national attention, "followed me all these years and I am always confronted by a moral dilemma. Should I stop people who introduce me as an ex-bunny and say, but I was doing it as a journalist?"
“The fallout from the Bunny story lasted decades,” writer Karen Karbo noted in 2019. “Whatever it was Gloria aimed to do — investigative journalism, political activism, magazine founding, and editing — she was dismissed for being too attractive.“
Steinem's perspective eventually shifted from shame to pride
In 1983, Steinem acknowledged that many of Hefner's Playboy Clubs had shut down. At the time her reporting published the clubs were flourishing.
"My exposé of working in a Playboy Club has outlived all the Playboy Clubs, both here and abroad," she wrote in the autobiographical notes of her essay collection, "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions." In the book, she listed the bunny assignment among her "personal celebrations."
In 2011, Steinem said that her reporting had sparked change within the Playboy Clubs and as a result working conditions for women inside them had improved.
She also noted that Hefner had scrapped the physical exams Bunnies were told were mandatory.
"The waitresses had to have internal exams and Wassermann tests for venereal disease, and they were told it was a requirement of the state -- hello -- it wasn't at all," she told The Early Show, discussing her four decades of work. "That changed, some things changed, and exposed it as tacky, which it really was."
The founder of Ms. magazine advocated tirelessly for women to have control of their own bodies, and have reproductive freedom, including access to abortion. "That is terribly important for women, obviously, because it's the greatest determinant of whether we're healthy or not, poor or not, educated or not, in public life or not."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Gloria Steinem had regrets about her bombshell Playboy bunny story
