I first heard about Gloria Steinem from her 1963 article about working as a Playboy bunny, which made a big splash. Reading it as a teenager, I was struck by how she mixed the sexism of the customers with the meanness of the owners, who expected their girls to be fun and attractive while working them very hard in very high heels. I got to know Gloria Steinem later, and I loved the way she mixed you-can-do-anything feminism with a talent for looking really good without appearing to be making any effort.

When people asked how she could be so glamorous at, say, 40, she'd just say, "This is what 40 looks like," and so on down the line to 50, 60. It was a new way of thinking about age, particularly for women. There was a time when much of the world regarded the women's movement leaders as a cadre of killjoys, out to destroy all the old-fashioned pleasures of dating, sex and marriage.

But Gloria Steinem's feminism didn't keep her from having a social life and attending to her appearance — the hair and the eyes and the always-attractive-but-not-fussy clothes. One of Gloria Steinem's contributions to feminism was helping to kill the killjoy thing. "I thought: 'What do I really want to do on my birthday?'" she told me when she turned 80. "First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants." She celebrated in Botswana.

By then, she admitted, her libido had pretty much faded. But she found a bright side — not thinking about sex would leave her more time for other stuff. "The brain cells that used to be obsessed," she pointed out, "are now free for all kinds of great things." She was fun to hang around with. I used to invite her to the columnists' Valentine's Day party at The Times, and she came even when her back was giving her too much pain to stand around sipping a drink.

So she always sat on a couch in the middle of the room, and my husband, Dan, always stayed alert for a time when she didn't have a companion, so he could zip over to keep her entertained. Wow, hard to believe Gloria Steinem's gone. Missing her already.