“What a tan will do is make you look good, and that justifies anything,” writes Gloria Steinem, the most famous feminist of the 20th century, in her now-forgotten first book. The Beach Book appeared in 1963. That same year, Steinem went undercover in a bunny costume in order to expose the rampant sexism of the Playboy Club—another place where women “looking good” justified anything.

The Beach Book appears much less political in its ambitions. In this massive compendium of stories, poems, song lyrics, riddles, games, and drawings, Steinem offers detailed instructions on how to build a sandcastle, how to tan, how to peel if you burn, how to bury someone in the sand, how to build and fly a kite, and more. The original dust jacket was made of foil—so it could double as a tanning aid. The pages are sprinkled with loopy, whimsical drawings.

When I happened upon The Beach Book, it was like discovering a note in a bottle, a buried treasure, a time capsule from the 1960s. Where could I find the queen of the second wave, the woman of staunch convictions and serious ideas, in the book’s embrace of the superficial and silly? Is The Beach Book merely the juvenilia of a woman who would go on to co-found Ms. Magazine, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and publish seven subsequent books? Or is there some relationship between this Dionysian version of the beach and the more serious work of activism? It came down to this: Is it possible—or is it even necessary—to understand how The Beach Book fits into the arc of Steinem’s career as an iconic activist?

The Beach Book begins with a curmudgeonly introduction by acclaimed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who confesses that he does not enjoy the beach (he calls it a “rather unpleasant place to spend time”). It eventually struck me, though, that Steinem’s book, passé and dissonant as it may be at times, is in some ways a response to this staid, patriarchal voice.

Feminists have long been informed (by just such patriarchs) that they are too angry, too strident. And Sara Ahmed has famously reclaimed the term “feminist killjoy,” embracing the pejorative as a badge of honor, the defining mission of someone who “disturb[s] the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places.” Here it is Galbraith’s anger and stridency that are on embarrassing display.

The Beach Book offers a different kind of feminism—there is no critique, no palpable discomfort with the status quo. Instead, Steinem delights in aspects of contemporary culture that would seem precisely at odds with her later explicit feminist commitments. Her instructions for achieving the perfect “golden brown” tan and for increasing one’s bust size, for example, suggest the pleasure she takes not just in complying with but even in enforcing her society’s most conventional beauty standards.

Steinem’s beach is also a place to get lost in daydreams, a seedbed for schemes and projects. One page offers 16 suggestions for things to fantasize about. Another section includes some roles to play: “The Audrey Hepburn Bit,” “Wall-Street-By-the-Sea,” “Pure Science.” Steinem encourages readers to “make your own abstract expressionist painting” and “make your own happening”—the beach is an exhibition space, an ephemeral gallery, a place for aesthetic experimentation.

Though Steinem may be indignant about injustice—and fiercely committed to wage equality and reproductive rights—she recognizes the role of pleasure in the larger project of world-making.

Much of The Beach Book consists of selections from other works, scraps of text that relate to the beach. A long section—“Things to Read While Laying on One’s Stomach”—includes excerpts from Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Herman Melville alongside snippets from the National Enquirer, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carson McCullers. Its anti-teleological, omnibus form lends itself to the spurts of attention one might devote to a book in between naps, swims, and picnics. You can read it for hours but you are not getting anywhere. In this book, as on a beach, a reader roams, meanders, stops and starts, rests and resumes. Getting wet, getting dry, going nowhere.

The Beach Book foreshadows the recent wave of books railing against the capitalist religion of productivity, among them Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2020) and Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (2023). Like them, Steinem celebrates rest and implicitly refuses the notion that leisure time should be channeled into edification or exercise. The jacket copy explains that the purpose of The Beach Book is to “make you feel better about wasting time on the beach.”

Steinem insists on play as a value in of itself, but there is nothing earnest or self-important in these pages. Instead of birdwatching (Odell’s favored non-work pastime), Steinem suggests burying a friend in the sand or giving someone a back rub. The pleasures of the beach are worthwhile in of themselves and entirely separate from self-improvement or even (gasp!) self-care. Indeed, Steinem satirizes faddish diet and exercise regimens, in a section devoted to a “seven-day program of Things to Think About While Lying on Your Back (Basic Position A) and Things to Read While Lying on Your Front (Basic Position B), each part scientifically planned to occupy the time you should spend in the sun.”

Steinem’s version of the beach as a site of games and projects has affinities with previous utopian notions of this liminal, fluid zone. It recalls, for instance, the slogan chanted by French activists in in 1968: “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“under the pavement, the beach”), suggesting that beneath the regulatory structures of the city streets is a realm of chaotic, undisciplined energy, a world of unexpected encounters and potentially illicit pleasures.

Like the beach in this formulation, Steinem’s beach is a democratic realm of camaraderie and whimsy. One of Steinem’s most frequently cited quotations—“Hope is a form of planning”—theorizes a relationship between optimism and action, play and praxis. Elsewhere she has extolled laughter as the guide to freedom. Though Steinem may be indignant about injustice—and fiercely committed to wage equality and reproductive rights—she recognizes the role of pleasure in the larger project of world-making. Does she persuade the reader to regard the beach as a key site in Western cultural history? Maybe not, but The Beach Book is a testament to the beach as fertile ground for the forms of reverie and experimentation that animate all liberatory projects.