When Gloria Steinem speaks at colleges these days, she half-expects a male student to rise and ask, ”How can I combine career and children?”
In the 14 years since Ms. magazine was born, men have come a long way. So has Ms., where Steinem, a founding editor, still serves as a member of the editorial collective responsible for the contents of the magazine. Ms. helped change the lives of a generation of women, and of a lot of men, albeit slowly. In the preview issue of Ms., carried as a magazine-within-a-magazine in a year-end issue of New York, a note explained, ”Now Ms. is being adopted as a standard form of address by women who want to be recognized as individuals, rather than being identified by their relationship with a man.” That was 1971. Two months ago, the New York Times got around to using the Ms.
”standard.” ”I went over with flowers for (Times executive editor) Abe Rosenthal,” Steinem says.
But while the magazine has won several battles, the wider women`s war continues, and leaves the outlook for a magazine of feminist political sensibilities unsettled. The drive for ratification of the equal-rights amendment failed. Conservatives in Ronald Reagan`s America are trying to roll back abortion legislation. Ms. itself, which began with a circulation of 300,000 and reached more than 500,000 in the late 1970s, has now leveled off at around 480,000. Along with many magazines suffering through the present nervous economy, Ms. has seen ad pages slide. Ms. sold 304 pages through August of this year, compared with 366 for the same period last year. Publisher Pat Carbine is more optimistic about 1987.
Although reconstituted in 1979 as an educational foundation, to qualify for more favorable postal privileges among other things, Ms. loses money. Carbine and Steinem must sell ads and rattle the fund-raiser`s tin cup. Ms. copy editors may still capitalize the term ”Women`s Movement,” but Steinem sometimes wonders if, instead, they should be changing it to ”women moving.” In fact, both are accurate. ”The Women`s Movement has been declared dead every Wednesday at teatime since 1969,” Steinem says, pointing to such evidence of vitality as a recent Newsweek poll in which 56 percent of the women sampled answered yes to the question ”Do you consider yourself a feminist?” But ”feminist” can cover a range of attitudes. For Ms. now, the important figures are the women who are moving economically.
Women`s pitched battles of social and political principle were fought in the 1960s and early 1970s: Title IX, Roe v. Wade, the ideals of equal opportunity and equal parenthood. The pages of the early Ms. isues were urgent calls to the barricades. Headlines shouted, ”DOWN WITH SEXIST UPBRINGING,”
”SISTERHOOD,” and (a wife`s demand) ”I WANT A WIFE.” Among the bold
”public manifestos” was one entitled ”We Have Had Abortions” and signed by, among many others, Steinem, Judy Collins, Nora Ephron, Gael Greene, Billy Jean King and Barbara Tuchman.
”Ms. was indispensable in the `70s, when the world was new and waves of women were going out to join it,” recalls the writer Linda Bird Francke, an early contributor. The movement`s leadership–Betty Friedan, Steinem and others–hurled itself on the barbed-wire barriers of the male redoubt. The next generational wave–young entitled women–swarmed over . . . to Harvard Medical School, Salomon Brothers, Sullivan & Cromwell, only to find more wire, including such economic issues as equal pay for equal work. In place of the manifestos of the commune, Ms. now offers a ”Money” department. A breakdown of the edit pages of Ms. in 1985 shows that ”Careers, Finance and Technology” is the third-largest story category by percentage (14) after
”The Arts” (22) and ”Parenting and Personal Relations” (20).
Some movement veterans think the Ms. of the 1980s is ”too predictable.” An editor of another publication, who requested anonymity, said that while she subscribes to Ms. ”as a gesture,” she no longer finds it ”compelling.” In her 40s, this feminist may have changed more than the magazine: ”I don`t march anymore,” she says. The most arresting fact about Ms. readers is that their median age has remained at 31 since the first year of publication. The number means that Ms. must constantly be attracting new readers–and, of course, losing older ones. This movement of women pleases advertisers, who prize fresh customers with unformed buying habits.
Ms. pages mirror movements in the magazine business as well as in women`s lives. The coverage in the early Ms. was egalitarian; the contemporary Ms. celebrates celebrity: Oprah Winfrey, Judith Resnik, Sallie Bingham–the sort of people who turn up in People. ”Fashion, Fitness and Health” is a growing editorial category.
The main constant in the magazine, though, has been its attention to women`s sexuality. The first issues circumspectly took up the topic of lesbian love, and Carol Rinzler sedately, but hilariously, reviewed a dozen sex manuals. The current Ms. offers Lindsy Van Gelder`s ”consumer guide” to sexual aids, including dildoes, vibrators, erotic videos and a device called the G-spotter. Products are rated for use by both heterosexual and lesbian women.
If Ms. reflects changes in the wider society of women, it also helps create change. In a backlash era, Steinem and Carbine have kept the magazine politically correct–for example, by helping attract black women editors and regular contributors at a time when all too many magazines resist real integration. (Nearly 12 percent of Ms. readers are black.)
Steinem herself has become something of an icon. Indeed, she is more celebrated than most of the women profiled in Ms. Two years ago, when she gave herself a 50th birthday party–rather than hide from galloping middle age –many women her age applauded (although some wished she would gain a little weight). Strangers claim to know as much about her private life as they do about the life of any of the personalities in the gossip columns. (Steinem is still seen with Mortimer Zuckerman, the developer and publisher.) She has become a regular contributor on NBC`s ”Today” show, corralling such interview-shy stars as Robert Redford and Cher to answer her (somewhat soft)
questions.
Steinem hasn`t dimmed her feminist outlook for the sake of the columns or the morning newszak. In October, she and a ”Today” crew will tour the Betty Ford Center, near Palm Springs, in the company of Ford, who was treated in 1978 for alcoholism and prescription-drug dependency. Steinem wants to make two political points with the ”Today” piece: that drug addiction devastates more women than men and that it hits upper-class mansions as well as poor tenements.
Steinem`s feminist politics and social interests–the view of woman as victim, her life of woman as celebrity–are fused in her latest work. The August Ms. carried a black and white cover photo of a fresh-faced Marilyn Monroe and asked, fanzine-style, ”If she had lived . . . who would she be today?” The answer, excerpted from a book on Monroe by Steinem, to be published in November, is maddeningly inclusive. Steinem sees Monroe, who would have turned 60 in June, as, variously, an actress, lawyer, teacher, artist, rancher and defender of lost children and animals. Abused and abandoned herself–and according to Steinem, with a history of 12 or 13 abortions–Monroe could identify with the defenseless.
Speculative as this exercise is it gives Steinem a chance to retell the story as a Movement tragedy. Monroe, the subject of so many male rescue fantasies–and of some 40 books, is now rescued by Steinem. Monroe becomes another of the victim heroines sanctified by feminist doctrine. Many deserve such status, others are dubious choices. Critical Ms. readers hold that the magazine and Steinem were, as one put it, ”suckered” by the victimization tales of such feminist cause celebres as Linda Lovelace.
Like the men in Monroe`s life, the men in Ms. pages are often ambiguous figures, sometimes adversaries, other times friends. ”When the world is divided 60-40,” says Steinem, quite reasonably, ”any time you argue for 50-50, it seems threatening.” Ms. has become less vigilant, if not downright relaxed, about the nature of the oppressor class. An early Ms. cover showed an eight-armed woman juggling all her roles. The September, 1986, issue takes up that mythic college student`s question about having both job and family. The cover asks, ”Can men have it all?” and shows a smiling househusband, arms full, cradling baby, phone and briefcase. As Ms.–and misters–grow older, perhaps everyone is getting more evenhanded.
