She’s only 25, but she’s as battle-scarred as any veteran of the culture wars. She has a dozen daughters in high places, but for much of her life, her finances have been an outright mess, and she has dangled close to death more times than she cares to remember. She has been called a strumpet and a prude, but never a lady. Still, as she strides toward the 21st Century, she’s every bit as mulish, outrageous and uncompromising as the day she burst upon the world, kicking and screaming in protest.
Ms. magazine is 25 years old. Founded in 1972 with the premise that, as founder Gloria Steinem put it, “women are full human beings,” its birth was as unconventional as its later life, the product of a sympathetic man’s eagerness to try out a new concept and the conviction of a group of feminists that the movement that was reshaping women’s lives needed its own voice.
Steinem became convinced of this need while she toured the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s giving lectures on women’s liberation. “Again and again, a woman in the audience would stand up and say: `Thank God, I’m not alone. I thought I was the only one who felt this way,’ ” Steinem said.
Steinem felt a hunger for information among the women to whom she spoke. “We need to start a newsletter,” she told Brenda Feigen, Steinem’s co-founder of the Women’s Action Alliance.
“Not a newsletter,” Steinem remembered Feigen saying, “a magazine.”
It was a suggestion Steinem resisted, according to Mary Thom, a former editor at Ms. and author of “Inside Ms.: Twenty-five years of the magazine and the feminist movement,” to be published in July by Henry Holt. “Gloria had to be backed into it,” Thom reported. “She knew it would be an enormous undertaking.”
Steinem, then 38, had gained fame as a feature writer for some of the top magazines in America. Her serene, somewhat glacial beauty, combined with her articulateness and unflappable calm had made her a media darling, the most visible feminist of the time. She was a natural choice to head a feminist magazine.
Steinem began talking with female editors and writers about a women-owned, feminist-run magazine. Many of these women had seen their stories about the women’s movement rejected by editors and publishers, most of whom were men. “They were told, `We’ve already done our feminist piece,’ ” Thom recalled.
One woman who offered advice and expertise was Pat Carbine, then the 40-year-old editor in chief of McCall’s magazine. Carbine, one of the most well-known and respected women in the publishing business, helped Steinem scout around for financing. But investors were cold to the idea of a feminist magazine, believing there would be no market for it.
“They kept saying, `Where’s your market research?’ ” said Joanne Edgar, who was on the original team at Ms. “Well, we didn’t have any money for market research.”
At this point, Clay Felker, editor of New York magazine, stepped in with an idea. Felker was interested in the concept of a one-shot, a single issue of a magazine to test the market. New York magazine traditionally produced a double issue at the end of each year, and Felker proposed that Steinem and her team write a 30-page insert that would appear in the 1971 year-end double issue. In exchange, New York magazine would publish a 130-page version of the same insert as a one-shot preview of the new feminist magazine.
Felker’s proposal was accepted, and in December 1971, the year-end issue of New York magazine appeared with 30 pages of a new magazine called Ms. inserted in its center. The insert contained material daring even by today’s standards, including articles on abortion, lesbianism and writing a marriage contract. But perhaps the piece that won the most long-lasting fame was “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” in which writer Jane O’Reilley wrote of the “click! of recognition,” when an ordinary woman suddenly realizes that she is being treated unfairly and starts to rebel.
“A friend of mine stood and watched her husband step over a pile of toys on the stairs, put there to be carried up,” wrote O’Reilley. ” `Why can’t you get this stuff put away?’ he mumbled. Click! `You have two hands,’ she said, turning away.”
This article and the others in the insert had New York women clicking like Geiger counters at Chernobyl, and New York magazine sales surged for that issue.
But the creators of the fledgling magazine were still nervous.
“The preview issue was the real test,” Steinem recalled. The magazine might do well with sophisticated New Yorkers, but would it play in Peoria?
The preview issue of Ms. went on sale nationwide on Jan. 25, 1972. Steinem went on tour promoting it, but in San Francisco, she received disturbing news. The television and radio stations she was to appear on were having trouble finding a copy of the magazine.
Frantic, she telephoned Felker in New York. “There must be a problem with your distributors,” she told him.
But there was no problem with the distributors. A little more than a week after it hit the stands, all 300,000 copies of the preview issue of Ms. had sold out.
Shortly after, Carbine abandoned her high-pay post at McCall’s to became publisher of Ms. “Pat always said that coming from a big Irish Catholic family, one of them had to take the vow of poverty, so it might as well be her,” said Steinem.
The first regular issue of Ms. was launched in July 1972. Since then, the magazine has published groundbreaking stories on subjects such as domestic violence, incest and breast cancer. Linda Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, credits Ms. for being among the first to spotlight the need to reform rape laws. Fairstein added that years later, when she was prosecuting the “Preppie Murderer,” who claimed that his teenage victim had died as a result of consensual “rough sex,” Ms. published the first cogent analysis of the “blame the victim” defense.
Terms such as “sexual harassment,” “date rape” and “displaced homemaker” entered the lexicon, in part because of coverage in Ms. “We named many problems that were not perceived as problems then but were just called `life’ ” Steinem said proudly.
“Our covers were a significant issue,” said Carbine. “We broke the rules and put a woman of color on the cover. We also put women who were older on the cover, another taboo. We were told we were swallowing a suicide pill, but somebody had to have the guts to do it.”
One cover in particular distressed the magazine’s advertisers. In August 1976, Ms. published on its cover a harrowing photograph of a battered woman. “Our women in advertising had a terrible time with that cover,” said Carbine. “They said, `You want us to ask our advertisers to put their ads behind that?’ “
The skittishness of advertisers accounted for much of the rocky financial history of the magazine. Not only were Ms. topics and covers controversial, but Ms. refused to promote products in its articles. That meant no fashion articles on the latest “must-have” skirt, no features on a new shade of eye shadow or blush. “The advertisers were used to a much sweeter deal,” Carbine said.
“One thing I regret is that we wasted so many years fighting for advertising,” said Steinem. “We hit our heads against the wall from 1972 until 1990.”
In 1987, exhausted by the battle to keep the magazine afloat, the founders sold it to an Australian media firm. Ms. continued to lose money and in 1989 was resold to Lang Communications. Carbine left as the publisher with the sale and is now president of the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication.
Steinem, at that time a consulting editor for Ms., persuaded Lang to adopt a radically unconventional approach to the magazine’s financial woes. Ms. would dispense with advertising altogether and rely solely on subscription income. Shortly after, Ms. started to turn a profit. The magazine stayed in the black, even as Lang Communications foundered. Ms. has since been sold to MacDonald Communications Corp., along with two other magazines, Working Woman and Working Mother.
“We discovered that we could make money by not following conventional wisdom,” Steinem said. “Whenever we followed the conventional wisdom of the publishing industry, we were proved wrong.”
Over the years, Ms. experimented with other unconventional business practices, such as flex-time and job-sharing. In the early issues, in an attempt to be more democratic than traditional businesses, the magazine listed its staff alphabetically in the masthead, without titles.
The magazine later dropped the practice (younger staff members argued that they needed titles to show subsequent employers what they had done), but the open and flexible atmosphere at Ms. offered young staffers unprecedented opportunities.
“It wasn’t a traditional place,” explained Thom. “You could create your own projects. We could make our jobs anything we wanted if we were willing to work hard enough.”
Talented young women at Ms. were able to gain experience in all aspects of the publishing business, from writing and editing to sales and marketing.
As a result, Ms. served as a training ground for a fleet of female writers, editors, publishers and executives, among them Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Corp.’s magazine division; Valerie Salembier, publisher of Esquire; and Janice Grossman, president of advertising and marketing at K-III Consumer Magazines. Women like these helped change the face of American publishing, and other magazines now routinely cover many of the topics that Ms. pioneered, such as domestic violence and rape.
To some critics, this has left Ms. without an agenda.
“I think Ms. is irrelevant,” said Karen Lehrman, author of “The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex and Power in the Real World,” to be published by Doubleday in May. “I’d rather publish in more mainstream publications.”
Lehrman, 35, whom Ms. has described as a “pseudo-feminist,” believes that the magazine is out of touch with today’s women, fighting yesterday’s battles instead of acknowledging the gains women have achieved in the past 25 years.
“The women’s movement was a success, and they don’t know what to do with it. They focus on this concept of an amorphous patriarchy and insist that only government intervention or massive societal change will solve women’s problems. Women like to feel that they are in control, but Ms. tells them that they are not.”
But Carbine insists that younger women like Lehrman may be suffering from an illusion of control, an illusion based on the sexual and physical power of youth.
“As these begin to give way to a more mature kind of look, then it becomes essential to understand power relationships in a new way,” she said. For these reasons, Carbine asserted, women tend to become more radical as they age.
“But think,” she continued, with rising enthusiasm. “We now have a cohort of women who were radicalized in the 1960s and are now moving into the next century. Never before have we had such a large group of aware women. You only have to look at the last elections to begin to understand the importance that this cohort represents. Who knows where it will lead?”
