Trailblazers
This is the conclusion of a serialized longform essay about two pivotal issues of Playboy magazine in the late 1970s.
Live an authentic life and you don’t have to worry about your reputation.
~ Joan Jett
When Hugh Hefner died in September 2017, The Clarion Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper, ran a remembrance that did not refer to Gloria Steinem or “A Bunny’s Tale.” Instead, that article celebrated the three women from the Magnolia state who had posed in Playboy as centerfolds: Ellen Stratton and Stella Stevens, who’d both been featured in 1959, and Missy Cleveland, who’d entered the Great Playmate Hunt and been selected as Miss April 1979. It was an article celebrating those three women, but also an article about Playboy and feminism.
Acknowledging Ellen Stratton, Miss December 1959, who’d become the first Playmate of the year, Barbara Gauntt, the journalist who’d written the article, saw that in posing, “she had to have been a strong, independent individual.” As Ms. Gauntt points out, “1959. It was a man’s world. This was a time when women were stuck in the confines of society.” The feminist movement had yet to emerge, but these were young women who’d chosen to break “with convention.”
Starting in the 1950s when women didn’t yet have a voice and going through to 1979 when second wave feminism was in full force, these women were change agents and mavericks and rebels and dissidents. They were trailblazers.
Barbara Gauntt’s words echo a sentiment long overdue:
[Being] a Playboy Playmate, it’s not the path for everyone or what many people might have chosen, but bravery comes in many forms. Merriam Webster defines chutzpah “[as] supreme self-confidence.” There’s something to be said for that.
A note of thanks
Truly. Knowing there were kindred souls and a growing community on the other side of my computer has kept me going. This is the conclusion of my longform serialized essay on Playboy. Thank you all so very much for taking this journey with me.
Coming up
I originally stumbled down a rabbit hole to 1979 while researching my debut crime novel Nightswimming, which comes out later this year. Going forward, I’ll continue posting to Substack twice a month, about film noir, women who’ve been dismissed or ignored, and what I loved most about writing a male protagonist.
This Week’s Recommended Reading/Listening
Mary Oliver Reads “Blue Horses”
This Week’s Music
"Dance the Night Away (2015 Remaster)" by Van Halen (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
All questions and comments are welcome, but here are some thoughts for this week:
What was the one fact that surprised you most in the series?
What is your one takeaway?
Loved the exploration of what the former bunnies had to say about their experience in light of the Steinem piece. Great series, Melanie.
I learned so much from this series... the tone of Ellen Goodman's op-ed stays with me. Nothing about women monitoring what other women do or say, "because feminism," is new, and that is depressing, but also strangely reassuring, to know that my gen (millennials) aren't the first to experience this. (For a contemporary case study, look up Ballerina Farm...)