Ms Magazine History

History Final
Ms. Magazine was a feminist magazine that told the real lives of women and events during the women's rights movement. Ms. played an important role in the movement due to the fact that it was one of the only mainstream media forms to tell these narratives and be run by all women. Ms. Magazine had its ups and downs, the downs mostly when it first opened, and the ups when it became very successful and made people realize the truth about society. However through it all the magazine continued to share harrowing truths and to support women and the movement.
Ms. Magazine was opened as a “one shot” in The New York Magazine in 1971. At the time a meager amount of people thought that it would succeed. It is now one of the most important
and essential staples in the women's rights movement. At the time of its release, feminist ideals were a hushed idea in the media. The women's rights movement was becoming more mainstream but with a tone of unseriousness and rarely mentioned.
Ms. was needed because it publicized issues few were brave enough to mention to the world. At this stage of the movement, women could not get a credit card without a mans signature, they were only seen as baby-making machines and wives.
Many magazines for women were for “saving marriages”, “raising babies”, cosmetics, how to “lure” a man and how to “ keep” him. Women were not seen as equals, they had few legal rights in divorce, and had trouble getting jobs because most that were hiring would say “Help wanted, male”.
When all of this was in flux, words such as “sexual assault” or “domestic violence” did not exist. Incidents as such were watched over with a jaded eye. There were no rape centers, women’s shelters, or crisis centers.
In the magazine world, few women ran magazines, and the journalists could not write about the stories they wanted, but to write about recipes, fashion, makeup and man advice.
When Ms. first came out, well respected and renowned news anchor Harry Reasonor said that he did not think that it would last for more than a month. Once that was said by such a well known man with many fans, people listened to him and thought that Ms. was a joke.
Columnist James J. Kilpatrick also made fun of the magazine, although his opinion did not make such of an impact as Reasoners did, it still made a mark from the opposing side of the movement.
In 1969, Gloria steinem, a cofounder of Ms., released her first feminist article ““After black power, women's liberation”.
The article speaks about the women’s right’s movement and the different moving parts of it. The next year Steinem received the 1970 Penney-Missouri Journalism Award for the article.
The first issue of Ms. sold out in eight days and by 1978 it had over 200,000 in subscription rates.
Naming the magazine Ms. Magazine is a poke to society saying that you don’t need to be married to have power. Ms. is seen as a young and naive label, so naming a magazine about feminist ideas a label that is seen as that would be controversial.
The magazine wrote about “repealing laws that criminalized abortion”, it also had a “no comment” column that had discussions about “environmental feminism” , women’s work styles, and the “politics of emerging technologies”. The magazine protested pornography, and wanted a study of date rape. Ms. was the first magazine to feature women demanding things rather than showing them off.
The 300,000 test “one shot” copies of Ms. sold out in eight days It had 20,000 reader letters and 26,000 subscription orders in the early
stages. “When I suggested political stories to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, my editor just said something like, ‘I don’t think of you that way,’ ” Steinem said. This is just one case of how women were treated and since things like Title IX did not exist to protect them and their intellectual rights and ideas were not heard fairly.
“It was all pale male faces in, on, and running media,” Robin Morgan said, as the editor for Ms.
in the early days. Women did not run magazines, they were not seen as capable of power and they were not seen as equal.
Ms. was like a clear voice for women. It was unrefined and it could not get twisted by the media without knowing the real truth since it was written proof of the stories and opinions of the women at the time.
It wasn’t the backbone of the movement, because the movement did not rely on it, however it greatly helped because the media would not show or mention the movement, but Ms. was so popular so it got the real message out there that women deserve rights.
“On March 18, 1970, about a hundred women stormed into the male editor’s office of Ladies’ Home Journal and staged a sit-in for eleven hours, demanding that the magazine hire a female editor-in-chief.” wrote Abigail Pogrebin, “It was a watershed moment. It showed us, the activists in the women’s movement, that we did, indeed, have a movement.” told Vivian Gornick to New York
Magazine. The women did have a movement, but what is a movement if there is not progress? That’s where Ms. came in because it had a female editor in chief, along with almost all of the other positions were held by females, and the articles found in the blog and the magazine were about real things, not about how to cook a chicken to keep your man happy. The narratives were unfiltered and were uncomfortable to retell, but that made the magazine popular, not because of some creeps looking for some weird stories to read, but because women realized even more so about how they were not alone and they were being mistreated.
Yes, without Ms. the movement would have still steamrolled through, however it would have been a little more difficult due to the fact that the media turned a blind eye to everything pro-woman, so Ms. helped spread the word and show that there was hope for the movement and for women.