‘Completely radical': how Ms magazine changed the game for women

The Guardian

6 hours ago

The first of July marks the anniversary of Ms magazine's official inaugural issue, which hit newsstands in 1972 and featured Wonder Woman on its cover, towering high above a city. Truthfully, Ms debuted months earlier, on 20 December 1971, as a forty-page insert in New York magazine, where founding editor Gloria Steinem was a staff writer. Suspecting this might be their only shot, its founders packed the issue with stories like The Black Family and Feminism, De-Sexing the English Language, and We Have Had Abortions, a list of 53 well-known American women's signatures, including Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag, and Steinem herself. The 300,000 available copies sold out in eight days. The first US magazine founded and operated entirely by women was, naysayers be damned, a success.
The groundbreaking magazine's history, and its impact on the discourse around second-wave feminism and women's liberation, is detailed in HBO documentary Dear Ms: A Revolution in Print, which premiered at this year's Tribeca film festival. Packed with archival footage and interviews with original staff, contributors, and other cultural icons, Dear Ms unfolds across three episodes, each directed by a different film-maker. Salima Koroma, Alice Gu, and Cecilia Aldarondo deftly approach key topics explored by the magazine – domestic violence, workplace harassment, race, sexuality – with care, highlighting the challenges and criticisms that made Ms. a polarizing but galvanizing voice of the women's movement.
Before Ms launched, the terms 'domestic violence' and 'sexual harassment' hadn't yet entered the lexicon. Women's legal rights were few, and female journalists were often limited to covering fashion and domesticity. But feminist organizations like Redstockings, the National Organization for Women, and New York Radical Women were forming; Steinem, by then an established writer, was reporting on the women's liberation movement, of which she was a fundamental part. In Part I of the documentary, Koroma's A Magazine for all Women, Steinem recalls attending a women's liberation meeting for New York magazine. Archival footage discloses what was shared there, and other meetings like it: 'I had to be subservient to some men,' says one woman, '… and I had to forget, very much, what I might have wanted to be if I had any other choice.'
The response to Ms was unsurprising, its perspective so collectively needed. 'A lot of these articles could still be relevant,' Steinem muses in Part I. But, says the publication's first editor, Suzanne Braun Levine, 'I don't think we all were prepared for the response. Letters, letters, letters – floods of letters.' Koroma unveils excerpts of those first letters to the editor, vulnerable and intimate: 'How bolstering to find that I am not alone with my dissatisfaction that society had dictated roles for me to graduate from and into.' By the time Ms was in operation, the staff was publishing cover stories on Shirley Chisholm, unpaid domestic labor, and workplace sexual harassment. 'Who is it you're trying to reach?' a journalist asks Steinem in an interview back then. She replies: 'Everybody.'
'They tried to be a magazine for all women,' explained Koroma in a recent interview, 'and what happens then? You make mistakes, because of the importance of intersectionality.' In an archival audio clip, the writer and activist (and close friend of Steinem's) Dorothy Pitman Hughes says: 'White women have to understand … that sisterhood is almost impossible between us until you've understood how you also contribute to my oppression as a Black woman.' Marcia Ann Gillespie, the former editor in chief of Essence and later Ms's editor in chief, confides to Koroma: 'Some of the white women had a one-size-fits-all understanding of what feminism is, that our experiences are all the same. Well, no, they're not.' Alice Walker, who became an associate editor, shared her own writing and championed others', like Michele Wallace's, in the publication's pages before quitting in 1986, writing about the 'swift alienation' she felt due to a lack of diversity.
Wallace recounts her experience as a Ms cover girl, her braids removed, her face caked in make-up. She adds: 'I want to critique [Ms], but they were very supportive of me. I don't know what would've become of me if there hadn't been a Ms magazine.' She left, too. 'I was not comfortable with white women speaking for me.' Levine admits, 'We made a mistake,' featuring Black writers but having few Black cover stars and no Black founding staff.
'The work still needs to be done; we're always going to have to rethink things,' Koroma says. It's a running thread in Dear Ms, one that creates a rich and ultimately loving picture of the magazine. 'Ms. is a complex and rich protagonist,' Aldarondo reflected. 'If you only talk about the good things and not the shadow, that's a very one-dimensional portrait. One of the things that makes Ms so interesting and admirable is that they wrestled with things in the pages of the magazine.' For Part III, No Comment (named for Ms's column that called out misogynistic advertising), Aldarondo chronicles its contentious coverage of pornography, which the staff primarily differentiated from erotica as inherently misogynistic, many of them aligning with the Women Against Pornography movement.
In an episode that opens with unfurling flowers and the words of the delightful porn star, educator, and artist Annie Sprinkle, Aldarondo depicts the violence of the era's advertising and pornography, and the women who were making – or enjoying – pornography and sex work, proudly and on their own terms. In a response to the 1978 cover story Erotica and Pornography: Do You Know the Difference? Sprinkle and her colleagues, the writers and adult film actors Veronica Vera and Gloria Leonard, led a protest outside the Ms office. The staff hadn't 'invited anyone from our community to come to the table', says Sprinkle, despite adult film stars' expertise about an exploitative industry they were choosing to reclaim. 'To see these women as fallen women,' says Aldarondo, 'completely misses the mark.'
Behind the scenes, the staff themselves were at odds. Former staff writer Lindsy Van Gelder states: 'I knew perfectly good feminists who liked porn. Deal with it.' Contending with the marginalization faced by sex workers, Ms ran Mary Kay Blakely's cover story, Is One Woman's Sexuality Another Woman's Pornography? in 1985. The entire issue was a response to activists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon's Model Antipornography Law, which framed pornography as a civil rights violation and which Carole S. Vance, the co-founder of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, describes in Dear Ms as 'a toolkit for the rightwing' that ultimately endangered sex workers. Dworkin, says Vance, refused a dialogue; instead, the magazine printed numerous materials, the words of opposing voices, and the law itself to 'reflect, not shape' readers' views, says founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin. The hate mail was swift – including Dworkin's, once a staff colleague: 'I don't want anything more to do with Ms – ever.'
Gu reveals something far more frightening than hate mail, a horror that didn't make its way into the film: death threats and bomb threats, which the staff received in response to their most controversial stories. 'There was actionable change that happened because of what these women did,' says Gu. 'The danger they put themselves in is not to be discounted. I get emotional every time I talk about it ... I have benefited largely from the work of these women, and I'm very grateful.'
That actionable change refers to the legislative reforms prompted by Ms's coverage of domestic violence and workplace harassment. In A Portable Friend, Gu examines the 1975 Men's Issue, the 1976 Battered Wives Issue, and the 1977 issue on workplace sexual assault. 'Back then, there was no terminology if a woman was being hit by her partner at the time,' says Gu. She spotlights heartbreaking archival footage of women sharing their experiences with abuse: 'If it'd been a stranger, I would have run away.' Van Gelder herself reflects on the former partner who hit her. 'Did you tell anyone?' Gu asks. 'Not really.'
In an archival clip, Barbara Mikulski, former Maryland senator and congresswoman, says: 'The first legislation I introduced as a congresswoman was to help battered women. I got that idea listening to the problems of battered women and reading about it in Ms' Adds Levine: 'We brought it into the daylight. Then there was the opening for battered women's shelters, for legislation, for a community that reassured and supported women.' The same idea applied to workplace sexual harassment: 'If something doesn't have a name, you can't build a response,' Levine exclaims. 'The minute it had a name, things took off and changed.'
Gu shared that while 'there's a little bit of questioning as to whether it was Ms who coined the term [domestic violence], they were certainly the first to bring the term into the public sphere and allow for a discussion'. The Working Women United Institute eventually collaborated with Ms on a speak-out on sexual harassment.
Despite obstacles, the scholar Dr Lisa Coleman, featured in Part I, describes the publication as one 'that was learning'.
'It's easy to be critical at first,' says Koroma, 'but after talking to the founders, you realize that these women come from a time when you couldn't have a bank account. It's so humbling to talk to the women who were there and who are a large part of the reason why I have what I have now.' Gu noted that the lens of the present day can be a foggy one through which to understand Ms — which, in truth, was 'completely radical,' she says. 'You weren't going to read about abortion in Good Housekeeping. You have to plant yourself in the shoes of these women at that time.'
Our elders endured different but no less tumultuous battles than the ones we face now, many of which feel like accelerated, intensified iterations of earlier struggles. 'Talk to your moms, to your aunts and grandmas,' Koroma added. Aldarondo agreed: 'One of the great pleasures of this project, for all of us, was this intergenerational encounter and getting to hear from our elders. It's very easy for younger people to simply dismiss what elders are saying. That's a mistake. I felt like I already understood the issues, and then I learned so much from these women.'
Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print premieres on HBO on 2 July and will be available on Max