Pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem’s career kicked off with an unexpected gig — working as a Bunny at the Playboy Club in New York City, and it nearly destroyed her life.
Steinem — who died Wednesday at 92 — was a young reporter making her way through the Big Apple’s male-dominated journalism world in 1963, when she came across an ad seeking “attractive young girls” to work at the Playboy Club and decided to go undercover for an expose.
Though Steinem was 28, she applied and was hired on — and spent the next 11 days strapped into a skin-tight Bunny outfit while working the floor at the social club.
Taking the fake name Marie Catherine Ochs, Steinem falsely said she was younger than her 28 years (bunnies has to be between 21 and 24) and got a job as a “door bunny,” welcoming visitors to the club in Midtown Manhattan.
She soon saw the misogyny and exploitation that came with the job — which had become famous and marketed as a way for young women to glamorously make money. The “bunnies” were allegedly fined if their tails were dirty or ears crooked. They were also forced to take invasive physical tests, and had most of their tips taken away.
She had recalled male co-workers leering at them and addressing them with calls of “here, bunny, bunny, bunny.”
“Being a Playboy Bunny was like being hung on a meat hook,” she told Interview Magazine decades later in 2020, the experience still vivid in her mind. “I had to work very hard in 3-inch heels and a costume so tight that I could hardly breathe.”
“I did not meet Hugh Hefner during the dreadful experience of being a Playboy Bunny, but I did meet him when I interviewed him,” she said, according to PEOPLE. “The most surprising thing about him was that he was pathetic. He was like an 8-year-old boy pretending to be a grown-up man.”
The article, called “A Bunny’s Tale,” became a sensation when it was published in Show magazine weeks after she quit the job, and it turned Steinem from just another byline into a household name while signaling her coming transformation into a champion for women.
It even got Hefner to change the rules, such as an end to the physical exams.
But it also came with huge baggage — with Steinem later confiding it was “a professional error of gigantic proportions” that nearly halted her burgeoning career in its tracks.
“I was just beginning to be assigned serious pieces and suddenly I was a Bunny,” she told the Associated Press in 2011. “I could not have made a bigger mistake.”
“It was personally and professionally a disaster,” she said. “In the short term, it was much harder to get assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.”
And even though the story of her time as a bunny would be made into the 1985 movie “A Bunny’s Tale,” staring Kirstie Alley, for years critics would use it to undermine her intellect and pan her as unserious.
“To this day, when people don’t like me they introduce me as a former Bunny, as a put-down,” she told the Times in 2016.
Despite those unexpected responses, Steinem always stood by the work it did for her fellow Bunnies.
“On the other hand, I did improve the working conditions for those women,” she told the Times.
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