More than Magazines: Ms., Sassy , and fifty years of feminism

More than MagazinesMs., Sassy, and fifty years of feminism Maggie Doherty (bio) Nearly all resolutions start with a meeting. When a group of female journalists gathered at Gloria Steinem's uptown Manhattan apartment in the winter of 1971, they were facing a common problem: none of them could get "real stories about women published." The male editors of the major women's magazines—called the "seven sisters," like the colleges—would not accept pitches that did anything other than advise readers to be better, happier, more productive housewives and mothers. General-interest publications, also edited by men, were no better: according to Steinem, her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine rejected all her pitches for political stories, saying "something like, [End Page 158] 'I don't think of you that way.'" Fed up and fired up, the journalists decided to start their own publication. But what kind of publication would they create, and for what kind of reader? Steinem proposed a newsletter, the kind of low-budget, low-circulation flyer that many feminist groups in New York City favored. But the lawyer and activist Brenda Feigen suggested something different: "We should do a slick magazine," something colorful and glossy that could be sold on newsstands nationwide. Not everyone was keen on the idea. As Vivian Gornick recalled forty years later, "Radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston...had a different kind of magazine in mind," one that might argue against the institutions of marriage and motherhood. When it became clear that Steinem and others "wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies' Home Journal," Gornick and her radical sisters bowed out. But others hoped that a glossy magazine might strengthen the feminist movement. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thought a slick magazine could be "a stealth strategy to 'normalize' or 'mainstream' our message." As a riposte to The New York Times, which until 1986 refused to refer to a woman by anything other than "Mrs." or "Miss," they decided to call their magazine Ms. The project was ambitious, quixotic, and, historically speaking, unusual. If the newsletter was the preferred form for revolutionary feminist publishing in the late 1960s, the glossy magazine was the form of the prevailing social order. While the radical feminist group Redstockings distributed newsletters and working papers—"mimeographed thunderbolts," they called them—at its consciousnessraising meetings, Ladies' Home Journal was publishing a regular advice column—"Can This Marriage Be Saved?"—in which male editors advised unhappy women, some of whom were stuck in abusive relationships, on how to be better wives. (On March 18, 1970, more than a hundred women staged an eleven-hour sit-in at the Ladies' Home Journal offices, protesting the advice column, the "exploitative" advertisements, the magazine's all-male editorial team, and the lack of childcare for female staffers.) Newsletters [End Page 159] could be made quickly and cheaply and distributed easily; a glossy magazine, by contrast, required infrastructure, employees, and a big budget. More experienced magazine editors warned Steinem and her collaborators against publishing articles about race or lesbianism, suggesting that these "controversial" topics would make it difficult for the magazine to court advertisers and newsstand distributors—both of which were needed to reach a broad audience. Steinem and her co-founding editors —a group that included Pogrebin, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, and Mary Thom, among others—decided to forge ahead. Ms. launched as a forty-page insert in New York's December 20, 1971 issue. Its cover image featured a many-armed blue Everywoman—visually inspired by the Hindu goddess Kali—holding an iron, a frying pan, and other household objects. The accompanying article, "The Housewife's Moment of Truth," detailed a series of infuriating domestic incidents (e.g., a man stepping over toys rather than picking them up) and helped popularize the feminist term "the click of recognition." When Ms. published its first standalone issue in Spring 1972, it included Johnnie Tillmon's essay "Welfare Is a Woman's Issue"; a piece on lesbian love, "Can Women Love Women?"; and an open letter signed by fifty-three well-known women who had undergone abortions. (Some of these women, including Nora Ephron...