Gloria Steinem was a powerful icon of America's feminist movement, and her career spanned a myriad of roles that changed the lives of generations of women. With her iconic aviator sunglasses and long, blonde streaked hair - which she considered rebellious in the 1970s - Steinem was an internationally recognised activist in the fight for women's equality. She spoke out for the legalisation of abortion, same-sex marriage, and equal rights and pay for women, and protested against the death penalty and female genital mutilation.
Her activism was not without a backlash - from both men and women - and harassment that could be as vulgar as it was intimidating. Born on 25 March 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Gloria Steinem did not have an easy childhood. Her father Leo Steinem was a travelling salesman and, together with her mother Ruth and older sister Susanne, they lived in a caravan, crisscrossing the country.
Leo abandoned the family and moved to California when Steinem was 10 years old, leaving her to care for Ruth who had long suffered with mental illness and had terrifying hallucinations. As a result, Steinem did not go to school full-time until she was 12 years old. She would later remark that she had never wanted children because she had already had one - her mother.
In the late 1950s she went to India on a research scholarship, and spent two years in a variety of roles, including helping village women organise non-violent protests against government policies, which sparked her interest in grassroots activism. Steinem left India and moved to New York City in the early 1960s to start her career as a freelance writer. It was a time when male-dominated newsrooms made it difficult for women to get hard-hitting stories.
Her big break came in 1963, when Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny cocktail waitress and wrote A Bunny's Tale, an exposé for Show magazine detailing the seedy and sexist reality of Hugh Hefner's empire. As soon as she arrived for the interview, a security guard called out, "Here bunny, bunny, bunny." Using the fake name Marie, she lied about her age - telling Playboy she was 24 years old when she was actually four years older. Steinem lifted the lid on the underpaid life of a Bunny, and the physical pain of wearing the high-heels and tight corsets for hours.
Despite the fame - and infamy - that followed, she still found herself struggling to be taken seriously by editors. Though the Playboy exposé helped land her assignments for the New York Times and New York Magazine, often they were about ladies' stockings and the latest hairstyles. "To this day when people don't like me they introduce me as a former Bunny, as a put-down," she told the New York Times in 2016.
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