On CBS Sunday Morning in September 2023, correspondent Rita Braver talked with Gloria Steinem and the team of Ms. magazine, which turned 50. Founded by journalists in the early 1970s to bring feminism into the mainstream, the magazine is still published today.
A magazine about women’s insides too
Why did the word “feminism” seem so threatening? “Because they didn’t understand it. And because they did understand it,” says Steinem, now 89. She was a columnist for New York magazine when she joined other journalists to create a new title. Even the name was a statement: “Ms.” for women who did not want to be defined as “Mrs.” or “Miss”, a form The New York Times long refused to use. Ms. would not offer household hints or fashion tips: it would write about equal marriage, about abortion, about women’s “insides”, not only their “outsides”.
Steinem says she became an activist while covering an abortion hearing, when she realised she had had an abortion herself, in London, and that no one spoke about it. The first issue carried a petition signed by prominent women: “I have had an abortion.” A sample issue first appeared inside New York magazine. When a listener told her on a California radio show that it could not be found, she panicked, before learning it had sold out.
The “click” and the advertisers
Executive editor Katherine Spillar spent two and a half years putting together an anthology for the anniversary, 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution. Readers’ letters often ended with the word “click”, after an early article by co-founder Jane O’Reilly about the moment a woman recognises sexism. Long before #MeToo, Ms. covered sexual harassment at work, with a doll on the cover because a real woman would have seemed too shocking, and some newsstands still refused to sell the issue.
Advertising was a battle: a cosmetics executive told Steinem that Ms. readers did not buy makeup, and car makers thought women did not buy cars.
Still relevant
Since 2002, Ms. has been published by the non-profit Feminist Majority Foundation, now as a quarterly. It remains relevant, its team says, because it gives a platform to discussions that still need to happen. Is Steinem still optimistic? “We have to imagine something before it becomes reality. So yes, I am a hopeaholic.”