Early in 1971, Gloria Steinem and a feminist lawyer named Brenda Feigen Fasteau brought together a group of female journalists to brainstorm ideas for such a magazine. Gloria and Brenda had a history of collaborating on feminist issues, ever since they met while working to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. In July 1971, along with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, they cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group of feminists working to advance the number of women in office at national and state levels—and to put women’s issues on both major parties’ platforms.
Around the same time, Gloria asked Letty to join some group discussions about starting a new publication back in New York. Gloria had hosted two of three meetings in her living room. Along with dozens of writers, editors, and other activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono showed up to discuss the new magazine that didn’t yet have a name. Almost everyone agreed that the movement needed a magazine, but what kind?
Gloria had been satisfied with a newsletter format, but Brenda envisioned a slick publication with newsstand appeal, an idea that Letty supported, though not everyone agreed. Radical feminists like Vivian Gornick and Ellen Willis wanted their magazine to look radically different from traditional women’s magazines with their perfectly turned-out articles about marriage and motherhood.
Then there was the question of the name. What about “A Woman’s Place”? “Lilith”? “Sisters”? “Sojourner”? “The First Sex”? “The Majority”? “Bimbo”?
After those initial meetings, the details began to take shape. In April, Gloria circulated a confidential memo: “Some notes on a new magazine . . .” Every Woman was the working title, and it aimed to speak to women who didn’t find themselves accurately represented in the pages of magazines like McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. “All are designed to tell the woman how to better run her household, her husband and her children—save for that unliberated woman’s survival kit, COSMOPOLITAN, which tells her how to be sexy,” the proposal read. “In short, the existing women’s magazines simply exalt woman as dependent sex object/wife/mother. . . . There is no magazine that addresses itself specifically to a new identification of American woman.”
The modern American woman was someone who realized that her own interests and actions were bound up with those of all women, regardless of race, class, creed, or color. She was part of a “We” that included college students, working women, women on welfare, and frustrated housewives marooned in the suburbs.
Though the magazine would include a range of viewpoints, it would target educated women with above-average incomes and sophisticated reading tastes running the gamut from Harper’s to Psychology Today. Assuming its readers were “intelligent and literate,” its editors would inform them on social and political issues directly affecting their lives, and feature content not typically seen in a women’s magazine or any magazine. Stories with headlines like:
•ABORTION: MORE DEATHS THAN VIETNAM
•DON’T BELIEVE HIM WHEN HE SAYS POLITICS BEGIN IN WASHINGTON. POLITICS BEGIN AT HOME
•SOMEBODY SHOULD HAVE LIBERATED PAT NIXON
•WHAT WHITE WOMEN CAN LEARN FROM BLACK WOMEN
•WHAT BLACK WOMEN CAN LEARN FROM WHITE WOMEN
With her background in public relations and political organizing, Elizabeth “Betty” Forsling Harris was listed as the publisher, but her commitment wouldn’t last a year due to a variety of problems, not the least of which was a major personality conflict. Notoriously difficult and prone to yelling, Betty threw tantrums—and objects—when she didn’t get what she wanted. After the fallout with Harris, Pat Carbine came on as publisher, abandoning her brand-new post as editor of McCall’s. “My plan was to get Ms. going with Gloria running it as editor, then to go back to McCall’s,” Carbine says, “but then came the moment when it was clear we would have to do it together if it was going to happen.” Joining Carbine and Steinem were cofounders Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock.
Shortly after the proposal made its first rounds, “Battling” Bella Abzug, recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1971, agitated for a new piece of legislation. The Ms. Bill would prohibit federal agencies from using prefixes that identified a woman in relation to a man. Women shouldn’t have to check a box for “Miss” or “Mrs.” on a government form when men weren’t required to reveal their marital status. The federal government should start recognizing women as individuals, “not as the wives of individuals,” Abzug told the House. The Austrians had adopted Frau and the French madame. Americans should adopt Ms.
“HELLO, I’M CALLING from Ms. magazine—”
“Where?”
“Miizzz. Em. Es—”
“What?”
It went on like that for a while. Every day, when the founders of Ms. magazine made an outgoing call, they got incoming confusion. But part of the beauty of Ms. was that it had to be explained—more than just a title, it symbolized a mind-set that, if adapted by enough people, could change the very infrastructure of American life. Outlining the magazine and its market potential to possible investors and advertisers proved trickier. Carbine and Steinem borrowed friends from Look and New York to help train their rookie staff, who grappled with a very basic problem: How do you explain a product that doesn’t exist yet?
They started with the basics: Ms. would be approximately eighty-eight pages, roughly the size of Time, and sold by subscriptions and on newsstands. Still, people wanted to hold something in their hands. They needed an image, so Carbine gave them one: Cosmopolitan. “Picture a spectrum of magazines—the Seven Sisters, fashion magazines, food magazines, etc.,” she said. “Along the spectrum of magazines not devoted to a single subject, like food or fashion, you could put Cosmo on one end of the continuum and Ms. would be directly on the other. We would be bookends.” Every advertiser knew That Cosmopolitan Girl. Well, the Ms. woman was her opposite in almost every way.
Cosmo’s articles were supposed to help girls get over their hang-ups, but its ads only reinforced them. “Do you have The Globbies?” asked one ad for the Slimmers Glove System: Simply apply some gel onto their two-sided glove to massage and buff those upper-thigh bulges away! Vaginal odor? “Relax,” read an ad for Cupid’s Quiver—a liquid douche available in champagne and raspberry flavors, among other scents—“And enjoy the revolution.”
By 1970, Cosmo was full of ads for personal hygiene and beauty products, but Carbine and her team had bigger aspirations for Ms. “We did not go for cosmetics at all,” she says. Instead, they went for cars, financial services, and alcoholic beverages. “I’m talking anything you could have found in Newsweek or Time,” she adds. “I believed that it was time for the advertising and marketing community to realize that women were worth as much as men. We were out there every day as agents of change. I viewed our advertising salespeople as educators.”
As Carbine saw it, she and her sales team had to do much more than convince companies like Chevrolet—which targeted only men—to advertise to women. They had to change the way those companies thought about women in the first place, not merely as passengers, but as drivers, literally and figuratively. “Do you have a daughter?” Carbine’s team asked more than a few executives. What was she planning to do after college? Might she need a car of her own someday?
“I talked about the spirit that was animating women to want to explore and begin to realize their full potential—and to be able to make choices about their lives that included a job working at home as a mother, but also included the possibility of getting into med school or becoming a lawyer,” Carbine says. “I think Cosmo’s basic message was, ‘Here’s how you get a more-than-suitable husband.’”
Just in case the difference between Ms. and Cosmo still wasn’t clear enough, the sales team sought to make it clearer through contrast, Carbine adds: “When push came to shove about comparing us to Cosmo, I do remember someone saying, ‘This is e
xtreme—but if you want to think about Cosmo as the poison, think of us as the antidote.’”
( 45 )
ENTER HELEN
1971–1972
“I’m a materialist, and it’s a materialistic world. Nobody is keeping a woman from doing everything she wants to do but herself.”
—Helen Gurley Brown in Time, 1968
Working as a kindergarten teacher in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Helen’s cousin Lou wasn’t aware that there was a magazine called Ms. in the works, but she knew that there were women out there who resented Cosmo’s message and derided Helen for it. Lou never considered herself a Cosmo Girl, and she took the magazine’s articles with a big grain of salt when she read them at all—but she also felt that the feminists were missing something important. “Even back then, as such a young woman, I felt Helen did not get the credit she deserved for freeing women to pursue their dreams,” Lou says now. “She was a self-made person, then encouraged and reinvented by David. I think most women will agree she was a feminist regardless of what her critics thought.”
Yes, Helen dispensed copious advice on how to catch a man, but for every article in Cosmo like “Why (Sob) Didn’t He Call and How (Aha!) to Make Him,” there was one like “Buying a Used Car Wisely.” Ever since Lou could remember, Helen had been ahead of her time when it came to giving women financial advice—she was obsessed with money, and she was also good with it.
Lou never stopped relying on Helen’s advice, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-six, she found that she needed it more than ever. Her first husband had left her when she was six weeks pregnant, and Lou soon found herself a single mother, taking care of an infant in a freezing-cold trailer. She knew she needed to move for the sake of both of them, and she found a house that she wanted to buy. She had saved some money toward a down payment, but she would have to borrow the rest. Everyone told her that no bank would lend her the money—that banks didn’t give those kinds of loans to single women—and she didn’t want a cosigner. She wanted the house to be her own.
“Enter Helen,” Lou says. “She told me, ‘Nonsense. You go and speak to the bankers, and I know you can convince them you will be a good client. You are great with money, so take a budget you have worked out and convince them.’”
Bolstered by Helen’s advice, in the summer of 1972, Lou made an appointment at the largest bank in the small town of Stillwater. The loan officer was pleasant enough, though very skeptical. The bank had never loaned money to a single woman before, he explained, but Lou was determined to be the first. On his desk, she noticed a photograph of a little boy and asked if he would be entering kindergarten soon. Yes, the officer said, he would be starting in the fall—at Lou’s school. “There was only one class, so I would be his teacher,” Lou says. “I asked the man if he would have wanted his little boy in a trailer that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Then I asked him if he was ready to take a chance on his son’s teacher. Sure enough, I got the loan and was never late on the payment.
“The point is, Helen believed in me,” Lou continues. “I felt empowered, and I know countless others did, too, although not from personal experience, but from Helen’s writings. She didn’t need to tell me to look my best and be as charming as possible; I knew. For whatever reason, that line of thinking went out of favor with many women during the feminist movement. But I’ll always remember that Helen was a believer in women.”
AROUND THE SAME time that Lou got her bank loan, there were sightings of Helen Gurley Brown at consciousness-raising groups around New York. Someone saw her at an organizer’s house, an informal gathering of sisters. Enter Helen: She came in, made a point of taking off all of her jewelry, and sat down with the group. “Somebody who was there, a poet, thought it was remarkable that she came in and took off her earrings, sat down, and got comfortable,” says Susan Brownmiller, who heard about it secondhand. “Then, at the end of the meeting, she put her earrings and all her jewelry back on. They thought that was funny.
“She was indicating that women have to put up this front, but that wasn’t really who she was. But she was also telling the women’s liberation women, ‘Get real.’ The front of decking yourself out glamorously—‘You have to do this, grow up.’”
At least that’s how the poet conveyed it to Brownmiller. “That’s what affected her the most; that this woman came in in costume and wanted everybody to know, ‘This is reality, kiddos.’”
( 46 )
THE BLUE GODDESS
1971–1972
“You not only enjoy being a girl —you thrive on it! And this quality endears you, naturally, to men. Good thing, too, because you are baby-helpless without them.”
—from “How Feminine Are You?” a Cosmo quiz in the April 1971 issue
Helen didn’t always make it easy for feminists to claim her as one of their own, but in 1971, the mother of the movement went to her for help. When Betty Friedan called that spring, Helen braced herself for another diatribe against Cosmo, but it never came. Instead Betty asked if Helen would consider attending a press conference with her and some other women to protest the impending repeal of New York’s new abortion law—the same one that Cosmo had covered in its November 1970 issue, soon after the law passed. “I said a mighty yes,” Helen told her readers in the September 1971 issue of Cosmo. “Well, whether the press conference had anything to do with it I’m not sure (Betty is a powerful speaker), but the daddy of the abortion repeal bill, New York Senate Majority Leader Earl W. Brydges, decided to kill it. Hooray!”
By 1971, the women’s movement was a visible presence on TV, in newspapers, and in magazines, but having a magazine of its own was a different story, and early into their search, the founders of Ms. were having a difficult time finding financial backers.
Convincing investors to pour money into an alternative women’s magazine was tough enough, but they were asking for a lot more than that. When they told those investors that they also wanted to retain at least 51 percent of the stock, screen ads for content demeaning to women (say, a beer company’s depiction of a sexy girl straddling a rocket), and donate 10 percent of the magazine’s profits to the women’s liberation movement, many potential investors backed off. Others never saw the appeal in the first place. At most there would be 10,000 to 20,000 women interested in the issues they proposed covering, these skeptics said, not nearly enough to support a national magazine; certainly not anywhere near the 100,000 women the founders hoped to reach in the beginning.
Then came a couple of breakthroughs. First, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham contributed $20,000 in seed money to help jump-start Ms. Next, Clay Felker came along with an offer too good to refuse. In August he still hadn’t committed to a subject for New York’s year-end double issue. For a while he had been exploring the possibility of publishing various “one-shots,” special issues on a theme that could become ongoing titles, depending on their newsstand success. Felker volunteered to finance a sample issue of Ms. in the pages of New York, suggesting that the two magazines could split the proceeds fifty-fifty. It was the best of both worlds: New York would pay the production costs of the first issue, but Ms. would have editorial control. After the debut of the first issue, Felker’s financial participation would end, leaving Ms. to be as independent as its name suggested.
They took the deal. With Felker’s early backing, Gloria Steinem could continue focusing on the editorial side of the operation—assigning articles for the debut issue of Ms., which would preview as a condensed, forty-page insert in New York that winter. In a small, cramped workspace, a handful of people worked around the clock putting together the full-length Preview Issue, which would herald their national debut. (Both issues were called previews, which is confusing—the shortened New York version came out in December 1971, while the full-length issue of Ms. actually came out in January 1972. It was labeled “Spring” just in case it dwelled on shelves until then.)
In addition to an article on “How to Write Your Own Marriage Contract,” wr
itten by Eye’s former editor Susan Edmiston, the full-length Ms. included an essay by Anselma Dell’Olio arguing that the sexual revolution was a war waged by men—and not to the benefit of women. (“A sexually liberated woman without a feminist consciousness is nothing more than a new variety of prostitute,” she wrote.) Also featured was “We Have Had Abortions,” a statement signed by fifty-three women who either had abortions themselves or knew someone who had. Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag, and Billie Jean King were among the names on the statement—soon to be addressed to the White House—which provided a card for readers to fill out and return to Ms. to help raise awareness.
Jane O’Reilly, a former colleague of Steinem’s from New York, turned in her piece about the American housewife who was at once tired of feeling invisible and powerless in her own home and fortified by the knowledge that she was not alone. Women all over the country were having “clicks” of consciousness as they watched the men in their lives wait for dinner to appear and the dishes to be washed and the toys to be picked up off the stairs without lifting a finger to help. Click! Click! Click! “Those clicks are coming faster and faster,” she wrote. “They were nearly audible last summer, which was a very angry summer for American women. Not redneck-angry from screaming because we are so frustrated and unfulfilled-angry, but clicking-things-into-place-angry, because we have suddenly and shockingly perceived the basic disorder in what has been believed to be the natural order of things. One little click turns on a thousand others.”
Gloria chose to feature “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” on the cover, along with a one-of-a-kind cover girl who happened to be blue. The artist Miriam Wosk painted a cerulean, modern-day version of the famously fierce Hindu goddess, Kali; her multiple arms juggling a typewriter, frying pan, steering wheel, and other objects symbolizing the many demands in a woman’s life.
Enter Helen Page 29
