She Wore the Costume for a Month. We Wear It for Life.

A memorial for Gloria Steinem, 1934–2026

Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at her home in New York City. She was 92.

We are not going to pretend that she was nothing to us. We are not going to pretend she was everything, either.

What she built 

Give her the credit she is owed, because she is owed a lot.

She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 and put the word “abortion” on newsstands next to the toothpaste. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Ms. Foundation for Women. She spent six decades saying out loud that women’s bodies were not public property, and she said it in rooms where saying it cost something.

The credit card in your wallet with your own name on it. The Ivy League degree your niece is finishing. The clinic that was legal until it wasn’t. Steinem was in the fight for all of it, and she stayed in the fight into her nineties, long after most people with a Presidential Medal of Freedom have retired to the lecture circuit.

She was funny. She was fearless in front of hostile crowds. She built institutions that outlived her news cycle. That is rarer than it sounds.

We hold all of that. We hold the rest of it, too.

The Bunny suit

In 1963, Gloria Steinem put on a fake name, a fake age, and a satin corset, and took a job as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club for Show magazine.

She was undercover. Her coworkers were not.

She wrote about the wage theft. She wrote about the demerit system. She wrote about the required gynecological exam and the bosses who treated a cocktail waitress’s body as a company asset. All of that was real. All of that was labor journalism, and some of it was good.

Then she took the ears off, went home, and spent the next sixty years telling the world what it means to work in the sex industry. The women she worked beside for those few weeks did not get to take the ears off. They did not get a byline. They got written about.

Steinem herself called the assignment a disaster, “personally and professionally.” She meant that editors stopped taking her seriously. She meant that men wouldn’t stop asking about the costume. She was describing, from the inside, exactly what stigma does to a person’s career.

She just never seemed to notice that she was describing our lives.

The lesson she chose to learn

There were two lessons available from the Playboy Club.

One: sexualized labor is labor, and the people who do it deserve wages, safety, and the right to organize like anyone else.

Two: the sex industry is inherently degrading, and the women in it are victims who cannot be trusted to describe their own experience.

Steinem chose the second one. She chose it for the rest of her life.

In Kolkata in 2014, she told reporters that prostitution “involves body invasion,” that it is not like any other work, and that “prostitution is the only word you should use.” Not sex work. Not labor. She was standing next to Apne Aap, a rescue organization, when she said it, and she was in India to help them raid the vocabulary we use for ourselves.

In 2015, when Amnesty International moved toward supporting full decriminalization, after consulting sex workers on four continents, she signed on with the coalition that tried to stop it, alongside a roster of Hollywood names who had never worked a stroll or a strip club or a cam site in their lives. She called Amnesty’s position a mistake.

She championed the “Equality Model,” the “Nordic Model,” the “third way,” whatever the branding was that year. It is the same policy every time: keep the worker’s clients and colleagues illegal, keep her landlord and her driver and her security person prosecutable, and call that liberation. We have the arrest data. We have the eviction notices. We have the bodies. It does not work, and it was never going to.

Why this matters to us specifically

SWOP Behind Bars exists because of what happens when powerful feminists decide that the women on the bottom need saving more than they need rights.

Our people are in cells right now because of laws written by legislators who quote Gloria Steinem. Our people have been turned away from domestic violence shelters, denied

housing, and lost custody of their children because the “victim” framing she helped popularize gets applied with handcuffs, not hugs. The rescue industry she lent her name to has a budget. The women it rescues get a criminal record.

She spent a month in a costume and used it as a credential for six decades. We spent our lives in this work and were told we could not be trusted to describe it.

That is the part we cannot let the obituaries sand down.

Both things are true

Gloria Steinem changed the world for women. Gloria Steinem also spent a great deal of her considerable power making the world more dangerous for a specific group of women, and she did it while claiming she was speaking for us.

We do not need her to have been a monster. We need the record to be accurate.

The feminism that put “abortion” on a magazine cover and the feminism that put sex workers in jail were the same feminism, from the same woman, and the movement she leaves behind has to reckon with that. Bodily autonomy that stops at the door of a strip club was never bodily autonomy. It was permission.

Rest in peace, Gloria. You fought hard. You were right about a lot.

You were wrong about us, and you never once asked.

SWOP Behind Bars supports incarcerated and formerly incarcerated sex workers and their communities. If you are a sex worker who has been harmed by rescue-model policing and want to tell your story, reach out. We take the ears off together.