When Ms. magazine debuted in 1972 with the premise that “women are full human beings,” the naysayers were plentiful.
One of them, syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick, called it a “C-sharp on an untuned piano. This is the note of petulance, of bitchiness, of nervous fingernails screeching across the blackboard.” Others predicted that the magazine would quickly run out of steam.
They were wrong! Ms. is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a big special issue that just hit the stands. It reprises some of the best of the magazine’s past while focusing on feminism’s future.
But the Ms. of today is a different, even more unfettered publication than the one early subscribers remember since it doesn’t depend on advertising.
Ms. took advertising in the beginning, but it challenged advertisers’ expectations that their ads would run adjacent to “complementary” editorial content. In most women’s magazines, fashion and beauty stories tended to promote the kinds of products that advertisers were hawking on nearby pages.
Well, Ms. wasn’t running the standard women’s fare on fashion and beauty and how to catch a husband. And it refused to run ads deemed insulting or demeaning to women.
When the first issue hit the newstands, women, who then were earning less than 60 cents for every dollar a man earned, responded by the thousands.
And as the years progressed, Ms. became a landmark institution in women’s rights and a magazine that defied the odds in a fiercely competitive industry.
Ms. offered the first cover stories on such topics as domestic violence and sexual harassment and identified women’s different voting patterns long before “gender gap” became common parlance. It was the first to report on alternatives to mastectomy and to document flaws in research on silicone breast implants.
Skittish advertisers accounted for much of the magazine’s shaky financial history. In 1987, it was sold to an Australian media firm, which glitzed Ms. up but couldn’t stem the flow of red ink. In 1989, Ms. was again sold, this time to Lang Communications, whom the magazine’s co-founder Gloria Steinem persuaded to take a very unconventional approach — dispensing with advertising altogether and relying solely on subscription income.
It worked. Ms., now a bimonthly with a hefty subscription fee ($45 for 6 issues) is solvent with a circulation of approximately 200,000. However, Lang Communications has since foundered and Ms. was subsequently acquired by Macdonald Communications Corp., which also owns Working Woman and Working Mother magazines.
“We discussed being ad-free in the beginning,” recalls Steinem, the magazine’s co-founder and now a consulting editor. “But we felt that we would not be taken as seriously in the magazine world if we didn’t have ads. We would be seen as some do-gooder publication and not a serious magazine. We also wanted to create a forum where advertisers would be rewarded for changing the imagery in their ads and for addressing women consumers with the kinds of products that had only been addressed to men before.
“So we went forward trying to get ads partly out of naivete about how difficult it was.”
For readers, the ad-free format has resulted in a sort of refuge.
“In these pages, women aren’t bombarded with messages that suggest that our hips, lips, thighs, size, eyes, hair, skin, wardrobes, personalities, lovemaking and child-rearing are in constant need of remedial attention,” writes Ms. editor-in-chief Marcia Ann Gillespie.
“There’s plenty of ad-free magazines now,” according to Samir Husni, director of the magazine program in the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, who cites Consumer Reports, Country, Reminisce, Country Woman and Mad as the big ones. The reason for the change is that so many magazines are launched these days, there aren’t enough advertisers to go around.
“Now,” says Husni, “most of the new magazines started in this country depend on the reader to pay the price for the magazine more than advertisers.”
“The uniqueness in what Ms. did is that they went from an advertising-driven magazine to a circulation-driven magazine,” he says.
Husni views Ms. as a magazine that was “groundbreaking when it first started, but I don’t know if a woman growing up in the 1990s really needs Ms. to learn about being a ’90s woman. I’ve yet to meet a woman whose goal in life is to get married, stay home, cook and wait for her husband.
“I think the circulation is based on people who just like to see that spirit of the 1970s continuing.”
Gillespie says that Ms. has gained “a significant number of younger readers” in recent years. “I see it because of the work I do on college campuses, and I also see it in the reader mail and in response to pieces in the magazine that really are there to appeal to younger women and that’s everything from a piece on the Indigo Girls to putting (26-year-old singer) Ani DiFranco on the cover last November.
“I did want to make younger women feel that this mag is as much theirs as it was for those of us who have been with it for a longer time. This is not a movement of just one age group.”
For the women’s movement, Gillespie says the biggest challenge is “how to move forward while recognizing that we have to constantly counter the sort of negative and often false imagery that the backlash constantly bombards the public with about what feminism is, what feminists stand for.”
In an essay called “Revving Up for the Next 25 Years” in the anniversary issue, Steinem, while acknowledging the gains in a world that now has “a degree of feminist consciousness,” sets forth a list of new or neglected ideas that deserve attention.
One of them involves money.
Without de-emphasizing the struggle to equalize the amount of money that women earn, Steinem now challenges women to focus on how they spend their money and use it as consciously as they would their votes.
“I think we need to become politicized consumers,” Steinem said.
“One of the things we haven’t realized is the degree to which women have been perceived as only consumers and used as an economic engine. After World War II there was, according to (economist John Kenneth) Galbraith, a very conscious effort to create intelligent, full-time consumers in homemakers. It was part of the pressure to get women out of the labor force and into homes in the suburbs after the war. It was, (Galbraith) says, a conscious, cynical attempt to turn homemakers into a replacement for the war, in effect to create a false market.
“We need to look at (consumerism) and understand that if we’re hooked on products, it’s a form of addiction that results from a lack of self-authority and a lack of self-respect, just as drug addiction does.”
As to the future for women, Steinem says she feels “skeptical but optimistic.” Whatever the future holds, chances are Ms. magazine will be there as a faithful companion.
