In the years leading up to the birth of “Ms. Magazine”, women had trouble getting a credit card without a man’s signature, had few legal rights when it came to divorce or reproduction, and were expected to aspire solely to marriage and motherhood. Job listings were segregated (“Help wanted, male”). There was no Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded athletic programs); no battered-women’s shelters, rape-crisis centers, and no terms such as sexual harassment and domestic violence.
Thus begins a completely awesome article in “New York Magazine” about the history of “Ms. Magazine”, which forms an amazing lens for the history of feminism. I think a lot about the history of feminism as a movement, because it makes me so incredibly mad when people air idiotic anti-feminist grievances that show zero understanding of how effective and important the movement has been.
My personal favorite feminist history quote ever came from an older rape survivor I know, who was assaulted in 1970. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Rape Trauma Syndrome had not yet been defined, and rape itself was often not acknowledged or slipped under the rug. The survivor had an absolutely horrible experience in the hospital, but the especially shocking quote from her history came in 1974, when she finally went to a therapist and asked for help. They had a friendly session; towards the end, she pulled together the courage to tell him she’d been brutally assaulted in her home four years before, that she had trouble sleeping, that she froze up sometimes, that she had flashbacks, etc.
The therapist took off his glasses and looked at her skeptically. “Do you really think that’s important?” he asked.
Thanks, feminism.
Some more great quotations from the “New York Magazine” article. Most of the article takes the form of a dialogue among various feminists, as well as some snips from letters or memos or other related communications:
Newhouse: Clay [Felker, a "New York Magazine" editor who helped start "Ms."] and Gloria [Steinem] had knockdown arguments about the first cover. Clay wanted a photograph of a man and woman, back-to-back, tied to a big pole. The idea was that they’re tied together, struggling.
Steinem: His cover was negative … limited. It was focused on marriage, not on all women.
Pogrebin: Gloria preferred a drawing of a female figure with many hands, juggling the tasks of a woman’s life.
Steinem: It had a universality because it’s harking back to a mythic image—the many-armed Indian God image. And it solved our problem of being racially “multibiguous” because she’s blue: not any one race.
Also:
Mary Peacock (co-founding editor, 1971–77): When Ms. started, you couldn’t pick up the phone and say, “Ms. Magazine,” because what people heard was “Mmzzz” and they’d ask, “What are you saying?” This would happen 25 times a day. So when we picked up the phone, we said each letter separately: “M-S magazine.” But gradually something changed—I could shoot myself that I can’t remember when it changed, because it was a huge watershed: Suddenly you could say “Ms.,” and everybody knew what you were talking about.
Also, let’s talk about sexual freedom and its correlations with feminism:
Steinem: Clay and many magazine people told me not to include a lesbian article in the first issue — and so, of course, we did.
Of course there are bits that I have, um, something of a problem with:
Mary Kay Blakely (contributor, 1982–2002): Even debates among editors who were close friends became defensive, judgmental, and hostile. You were either a vanilla-sex feminist or a bad-ass feminist.
Pogrebin: I threatened to leave over a manuscript by a woman who was a former editor of ours who was writing about why she was a masochist and trying to make it an okay choice. I would rather leave than work for a magazine that published that. And we didn’t publish it.
God forbid we accept female masochism! I do wonder what some of these accomplished feminists, women who I so admire, think of little ole me. Oh, well.
Anyway, behold how very, very similar the things are that historical detractors said about “Ms.” — compared to the things that people say about feminists now:
Syndicated Columnist James Kilpatrick, December 1971: “[Ms. is a] C-sharp on an un-tuned piano,” a note “of petulance, of bitchiness, or nervous fingernails screeching across a blackboard.”
Harry Reasoner on ABC’s Nightly News, 1972: “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say.”
President Nixon to Henry Kissinger on White House Audiotapes, 1972
Nixon: [Dan Rather] asked a silly goddamn question about Ms.—you know what I mean?
Kissinger: Yeah.
Nixon: For shit’s sake, how many people really have read Gloria Steinem and give one shit about that?
New York Times Headline, March 22, 1972:
“In Small Town U.S.A., Women’s Liberation Is Either a Joke or a Bore.”
Syndicated Gossip Columnist Earl Wilson on the Ms. Launch Party at the New York Public Library, June 30, 1972
“Speaking of libraries, some Women’s Libbers were well stacked and some ain’t never been stacked and never will be.”
Carbine: We learned that “Ms.” was being removed from public libraries as unsuitable reading material.
Steinem: Abe Rosenthal at the “New York Times” told me that no one would ever hire me again as a journalist; I’d thrown away my career.
Aaaand also:
Bernikow: I still meet women who say they had to hide their “Ms.” magazines from their husbands. It woke women up and spurred them to go out and do something.
Levine: I can’t understand where we got the chutzpah to turn people’s lives upside down.
This article is so full of brilliance and historical inspiration — it’s so touching for me. I’m serious, I’m almost in tears while I write this. Read it, please.
(Relatedly on the feminist history topic, a while back I wrote a post called “Grassroots Organizing for Feminism, S&M, HIV and Everything Else” that talked a bit about mid-1900s feminist organizations such as those that advocate for rape survivors, or “Jane”, the women’s collective that provided illegal abortions for those in need.)
I love MS. I remember my first issue, however you forgot to mention how much MS. has grown since its inception 40 years ago. The magazine has changed countless lives and continues still today.
Great post.
Uh, no. Misappropriating the image of a Hindu deity is not the way to do intersectionality.
I love this magazine and the changes it brought about. It saved my life in so many ways.
I can still remember my mother’s excitement when she brought the first issue home. She even read some of it out loud to us, insisted we read “Why I want a wife” and other now-classic pieces. It had a tremendous impact on my life.
Angel, quite so, but please remember the times, which were very backward in many ways: us people in the Heartland did not even know (or needed to be reminded) that OTHER RELIGIONS actually had GODDESSES! Not just saints and nuns, GODDESSES. It marked another change in consciousness, that we might consider that Christianity was NOT the Alpha and Omega, after all.
This was very radical stuff in Ohio! It was a short step from the cover of Ms, to me accepting a copy of the Bhagavad Gita from the Hare Krishnas, and actually reading it. I would never have dared touch it before that.
:-)
(As an aside, can I tell you how many customer service phone reps, etc., still call me “Mrs. Commando”? I have to tell so many of them to use a title that does not depend on my marital status that I sometimes wonder what year it is. Over a simple form of address.)
Fascinating. My mother was a very early subscriber to Ms. I read it regularly for a number of years, although generally not in public; as a 16-year old (then) boy reading Ms. in public, I would have been doing the equivalent of painting a target on myself.
For my own entirely selfish reasons, I’m quite pleased that so many radical feminists were displeased with the magazine in the 1970′s. It kept the vicious transphobia to a minimum; the only notoriously transphobic feminist I can think of who was associated with Ms. for a long period of time was Robin Morgan, whose views on that subject were, and I believe still are, entirely repulsive, and have been accurately described (in my opinion) as “lynch mob rhetoric.”
PS to Clarisse Thorn: I do hope your reference to “idiotic grievances” about feminism wasn’t intended to include criticisms by women of color and trans women. If it was so intended, it would clearly be you who had zero understanding, and it would constitute a thoroughly contemptible remark to make, especially on TDOR. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were referring only to anti-feminist “grievances.”
I was referring to anti-feminist “grievances”.
To clarify my stance, I honestly have no problem with a lot of critiques of feminism. It’s when those critiques completely fail to accept what kind of progress has been made, and why it’s been valuable, that I get a bit angryexplodey.
An excerpt from Jan Morris’ biography, Conundrum, was published in Ms in 1974, the first trans woman besides Christine Jorgensen that I had ever heard of. I still remember the happy photo of Jan that accompanied the excerpt. It was very positive and nobody editorialized over Jan’s words; she spoke for herself.
The anti-trans stuff was later, the first salvo was when they published an excerpt from Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire in 1979. There were several anti-trans pieces in smaller feminist newspapers, in quick succession after that. (My local collective responded with a big meeting, and I even wrote about that back in 2007: http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2007/07/youve-got-your-mother-in-whirl.html)
Robin Morgan was the editor of Ms from 1989-1993, solidifying the anti-trans line at Ms. But it didn’t start out that way. (sigh)
Thanks for clarifying, Clarisse.
Daisy, that’s what I remembered from reading Ms. in the 1970′s, so I was kind of surprised to see Robin Morgan’s name in that article. I’m glad to know that my memory that Ms. wasn’t originally anti-trans isn’t entirely faulty!
Hmm, yeah, seconded on the crappiness of the appropriative first Ms. cover. I mean, how hard would it have been not to use a Hindu goddess as a metaphor for the white American woman?
It seems a bit emblematic of the struggles of the mainstream feminist movement not to oppress women of color through actions they perceive to be liberatory.
I do in fact ID as a feminist, but I think that histories like this need to be tempered by the reality that certain strains of feminism have been immensely useful to some groups of women while not affecting or negatively affecting other groups of women.
I didn’t quote the bits of the article that talk about race-related stresses, but there is a section on it, including a bit on Alice Walker’s resignation from the magazine. As always, I encourage people to read the whole piece that I linked to.
The mag’s distribution was a miracle to nascent feminists in the proto-fascists towns and cities of the South. Any information on the Movement was greeted with enthusiasm. Imperfect, controversial, and so were we who kept the newsstand date on our calendars.
Daisy: I’m glad that the Ms. cover piqued your interest into other cultures. But if we simply accepted things as a product of their time, then the magazine wouldn’t even exist. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who’s has complained about an injustice and was told “that’s just the way things are.” This is especially important since stuff like this keeps happening.
Hey, as a brown, originally Hindu woman, I quite like the cover and don’t feel offended at all! In Indian culture, it’s the conservative, right-wing, ultra-religious people who get offended about depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses in not completely sacred ways. I don’t see this in any way as oppression of non-white women and I think we shouldn’t let it distract us from how wonderful the achievements of Ms. magazine were.
[...] Feminist History through the Lens of Ms. Magazine [...]
[...] Amazing feminist history through the lens of “Ms. Magazine … I think a lot about the history of feminism as a movement, because it makes me so incredibly mad when people air idiotic anti-feminist grievances that show zero understanding of how effective and important the movement has been. Source: http://www.feministe.us [...]