What Ms. Did & Didn’t Do
A brief history of the seminal feminist magazine.

In 1971, Wade Hampton Nichols Jr. was the Editor in Chief of Good Housekeeping. For Redbook, it was Sey Chassler. The Ladies Home Journal editor? John Mack Carter, whose office was home of an eleven hour sit-in by women demanding change. Sense a trend? So, also in 1971, Gloria Steinem wanted substance, and she wanted to give it to women. Substance was Ms. Magazine. In her 1983 book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Steinem recalls, “Trying to start a magazine controlled editorially and financially by its female staff in a world accustomed to the authority of men and investors should be the subject of a musical comedy.” Womanhood was at the center of both the rise and fall of Ms. Magazine, it was both too much for some but not enough for others. How do you become appealing when your existence and the discussion of the societal and systemic constraints plaguing you are controversial? Gloria Steinem and the women of Ms. Magazine wanted–needed–to answer that question for themselves. 

In a December 1990 cover story for Mother Jones titled “Ms. Fights For Its Life” Peggy Orenstein depicts the early days of Ms. Magazine as a scene from “an Andy Hardy movie,” a group of women sitting around the floor of a New York City apartment plotting how to disseminate their powerful message: the radical concept that women deserve equality, and how to achieve it. Already a prominent figure of the women’s movement, by 1971 Gloria Steinem was a staff writer for New York Magazine with a close relationship to its editor, Clay Felker. “Clay wasn’t a feminist in the classic sense.” recalled co-founding editor Nancy Newhouse to Abigail Pogrebin in 2011. But Gloria “had great legs” and was going to make him money. Said money would come from the world’s first glimpse of Ms. Magazine, a 40 page preview spread in New York’s December 1971 issue. Amy Erdman Farrell explains in an essay about the magazine, “New York and Ms. Magazine would split the newsstand profits, but New York would solicit all the advertising and take all its profits, for both the inset and the first preview issue.” 

The title “Ms.” needed a lengthy explanation in its first issue, but it was essentially meant to be a title for women void of marital status or any status attached to a woman’s relationship to a man. Co-founding editor Mary Peacock recalls, “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?’... 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.” The first cover had a quicker relatability with women: a periwinkle, octo-armed woman, glowing womb impregnated with an equally racially ambiguous baby, holding everything from a steering wheel to a type writer, from iron to broom. “Every woman got it,” said managing editor Suzanne Levine. 

Typically, the date format on New York’s issues includes the specific month and days of the issue’s week. The December 20, 1971 issue with Ms.’ preview was dated “Spring 1972” for fear that if it didn’t sell, at least it wouldn’t seem dated on newsstands. By the time it was out, Steinem was already in California trying to get funding and advertisers (any that didn’t mock her or spit on the cover would do). Steinem recalls, “I was on a radio call-in show when the caller said she couldn’t find the issue on newsstands. Afterward, I called Clay in a panic and said, ‘The magazine never got here! It never got here!’ And he told me it had sold out.” All of its 300,000 copies in eight days to be exact. 

For better or worse, at least initially, Ms. did not shy away from controversial topics. Its very first issue famously included a feature titled “We Have Had Abortions” with the signatures of 53 prominent women and a coupon to add your own name to the list. For reference, Roe v. Wade was a year later. Contributor Marcia Ann Gillespie told New York Magazine in 2011, “The magazine, despite its flaws, provided so many words that had been missing. So many silences finally broken. Ms. changed lives, changed attitudes, helped to create and change laws, policies, practices.” In the Mother Jones cover story, Orenstein wrote that, “During those early years, the pages of Ms. were consumed by revelation, by the simple act of naming: pay equity, maternity leave, wife battering, date rape, sexual harassment.”

But what was new about Ms., the content or the packaging? Although abhorrent for some (particularly husbands whose wives finally found the courage to leave them) for more radical feminists like the Redstockings, it wasn’t enough. In hindsight, Steinem admits that she “can understand if longtime feminists wanted more. But there needed to be articles that were for readers picking up a feminist magazine for the first or fifth or the tenth time.” Alice Walker, contributor from 1972 to 1985, resigned when she felt the magazine wasn’t diverse enough. She stated in her resignation letter, “A people of color cover once or twice a year is not enough…  I do not feel welcome in the world you are projecting.” Ms. found it hard to uphold the contrasting strands of feminism that had sprouted out of the base it created. 

Ms. promised to be an open forum for women and tried to commit to harm-free advertising. Women famously walked into their offices with ideas and got jobs that had the potential of building their entire careers. It also didn’t want to give in to mass-media and capitalism, but inevitably it both became it and was shunned by it. Orenstein explains, “Nothing scares off advertisers like controversy and nothing spells controversy like politics.” and continues, “Without such a deep pocket, Ms. was increasingly at the mercy of advertisers. And advertisers rarely showed much mercy.” 

Their advertising became problematic both for their pockets and their feminist promise. Highlighting women’s liberation over “products for housewives” became anti-feminist to a degree. In an essay about her 1998 book about Ms., Yours in Sisterhood, Amy Erdman Farrell writes, “Implicit in these comments [ie: liberation over jello] was the critique of traditional women's magazines as creating a vacuous feminine ideal under which women suffered tremendously, a critique that Betty Friedan articulated so clearly in her 1963 Feminine Mystique.” When a significant amount of their ads became about liquor and cigarettes, Ms. became vague in writing about addiction in women and the dangerous effects of smoking, particularly during pregnancy. Erdman Farrell concludes, “The editors of Ms. Magazine walked a narrow tightrope: soliciting advertisements from an increasingly narrow group of corporations willing to pay for space in the magazine; designing a magazine that highlighted the individualistic, monied feminism on the front cover while hiding the diverse range of feminist perspectives and well-researched studies on the inside…”

The magic and power of Ms. came from its “click.” Even in its faults and lacks, it clicked for women already in the movement and for women who didn’t think what they felt was real and common and that it was possible to do something about it. But eventually, it started losing its click. For Katha Pollitt, who wrote for Ms., she felt that, “They bought into the women-are-better line. I remember when Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed–they ran this piece about how she was going to be better because, as a woman, she’d be more this and less that. Maybe she’s not as bad as Rehnquist, but she’s pretty much a standard Reaganite figure who has not done great things for women. They were a little gullible because they wanted to be optimistic.” The readership and the power of the magazine also dwindled once women of the younger generation were able to achieve what the magazine was fighting for and persevere through what it was fighting against. After spending some time as a non-profit to assuage their financial troubles, in 1987 Ms. was bought by Fairfax with Sandra Yates as publisher and Anne Summers as editor, only to scale back operations six months later. Yates and Summers, with investment from Citicorp Venture Capital created Ms.’ new owner, Matilda Publications. 

Ten years and a slew of editors later, Gloria Steinem bought it back under Liberty Media for Women. Then, according to the magazine’s website, “On Dec. 31, 2001, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the largest U.S. based feminist research and action organization, became the sole owner of Liberty Media, and began publishing Ms., relocating its editorial operations to the organization’s offices in Los Angeles and the publishing operations to its Arlington, Virginia office.” Ms. now lives, as all of us do, on the internet, and publishes a print issue four times a year.

What happens when a political movement shifts into the realms of capitalism and mass-market production? What happens when even Richard Nixon has been quoted saying to Henry Kissinger, ‘For shit’s sake, how many people really have read Gloria Steinem and given one shit about that?’” When you are too little for some, but mean so much for others? What happens when you’re a woman running  a magazine? What happens when you’re–a woman, and what does it mean? Ms., for better or worse, attempted to answer and attack head on every single one of these questions and obstacles. They ignited knowledge, clarity and rage, and what better keys can one have to start a movement?