During her four years in New York, Chiba fought hard to stay productive and independent. “She was like a little general,” says a friend. She refused, even when dangerously ill, to accept unsolicited help. Her studio on Astor Place had a loft bed. One day Dolores Langone, Chiba’s closest friend in the city, asked her why she continued to make the climb each night. “She got really angry,” Langone remembers. “She said, ‘Don’t you ever ask me that again. That is the way I want to do it. And I can do it.’”
The sicker Chiba got, the more prolific she became: columns on cancer, a newsletter for Japanese career women, and, of course, the amazing number of books that rolled out of her word processor. One volume detailed life in New York: “I am not feeling very well, but I decided to go to the Museum of Modern Art, which was having a press preview of the Paul Klee exhibit. I was taken by an acute sense of joy the minute I entered the exhibit hall.” Another volume was on the idiosyncracies of the Japanese; a third was an advice manual, New Woman, offering helpful hints for the emerging Japanese career woman, tempered with Chiba’s penchant for organization. “When I buy a skirt,” she wrote, “I go straight to the hosiery department and buy about six [pairs of] stockings in the same color.”
Organization is a corollary of control, and as Chiba’s days became more uncertain, control became an all-important issue—not just in determining how and with whom she would spend her time, but in her fight to triumph over her disease. When she had to start a course of chemotherapy, she marched into a barbershop and had her head shaved.
“Why did you do that, Atsuko?” Langone asked. “It’s going to fall out anyway.”
“Yes,” Chiba answered, “but this way I control it.”
Despite the strength of her will, Chiba could not staunch the flow of her illness, and certain losses were difficult to bear. In November 1986, her voice became a husky rasp. “I had lost one breast from a mastectomy and at one point lost all my hair from anti-cancer drugs,” she wrote in that week’s “Preparing for Death” installment. “However, those losses were nothing compared to the loss of my voice. My voice, my manner of speech, my vocabulary, my intonation—these were all-important means to express who I am. . . . I imagine that I will experience one kind of death after another and that the accumulation of deaths will eventually lead me to the final death. I must mourn each death to my heart’s content, for behind each death is the preceding bright life that existed.”
For the first time she seemed to come to terms with her family, with whom she’d fought both in person and in print. Her mother had battled stomach cancer for fifteen years, experimenting with any treatment she came across—much to Chiba’s dismay. But despite their differences, Atsuko admired her mother: “[She] thinks it’s most natural for me to be working, even if I am seriously ill,” wrote Chiba. “The truth is that I am still upset about my loss and am encouraged by my mother’s positive attitude. . . . I told my mother that there was no longer a . . . cure for me. She started, ‘I know you will get upset, but in Osaka, a patient who’d been told that there was no hope had . . .’ I had to intervene with the little voice left to me. I cannot tolerate . . . illogical arguments. Fortunately we did not have to hang up in a quarrel. The truth is that I love my mother deeply and trust her completely.”
There was never a weakening of her spirit. Chiba seemed invulnerable. Part of that was simply a matter of the barriers she had put up. She continued to see many people—Norman Pearlstine (good friend and managing editor for the Wall Street Journal), Langone, Angela Santoro (her first roommate in New York), Fred Jaffe (her neighbor on Astor Place)—but confided in none of them. Jaffe was surprised to find out that he’d made a number of appearances in her column. “She never said she had written about me,” he says. “I had no idea that any of our encounters were that important to her.”
Some of Chiba’s apparent invulnerability may have stemmed from a fear of slowing down. She bought books she would never read and tickets to events she might never see, planned trips she would never take. “If I don’t make plans,” she wrote, “that’s . . . the same as dying.” Chiba seriously looked into moving to Moscow to try her hand as a correspondent there. She was always hopeful a drug might be found that would offer reprieve. But the miracle didn’t happen; in the last few months, as the pain became all-encompassing and the good days began to dwindle, a sense of discouragement began to invade Chiba’s columns. “I wonder if I have not reached the end of my endurance,” she wrote in April 1987. “Is there still a meaning to keep on living under such pain? If it would ease the pain, I feel I am almost ready to make a declaration of surrender. If I stop the treatment now, the cancer that has become smaller will once again grow. But now I do not even have one day of relief from this pain. . . . If I were given one comfortable day where there would be no pain and nausea . . . I would like to walk around the city and have three delicious meals, and I would be content to die that night.”
It was Langone who commanded her to enter the hospital on July 7. She was in terrible pain, and Langone sat with her in her apartment, rubbing her back. Afterward, Chiba sat up, and as Langone walked away, she caught a glimpse of Chiba’s body going down. Langone grabbed her before she hit the ground. “Atsuko,” Langone said, “I’m not asking you anything from now on; I’m taking over. Do you know what just happened?”
“No,” Chiba replied. “What happened?”
“You passed out, and I don’t want to be here if you’re going to pass out forever. I’m calling an ambulance.” Chiba argued, saying she could walk downstairs and take a taxi, but Langone held firm. When Chiba started to faint again, Langone called the paramedics. Atsuko Chiba died two days later, on July 9, 1987.
Langone wonders if Chiba simply decided that she’d had enough. The doctors had not expected her to die for quite some time. Maybe Chiba won her battle with the disease by choosing to throw in the towel. Her last night in the hospital she began talking about death with Langone’s husband. “John asked her very directly if she was scared,” Langone remembers, “and Atsuko said, ‘No, I am not afraid. I’ve done everything that I’ve ever wanted to do.’ He was a basket case, crying at her bedside, and she said, ‘Relax, John, everything’s going to be all right.’”
The Tokyo newspapers ran front-page obituaries, which made Mutsuko Murakami both angry and proud. “I resented that if the newspapers were willing to give this kind of space for her, they could have given her a lot of opportunity while she was alive,” she says. Sales of Chiba’s books increased, and Murakami is somewhat bitter about that, too. But every yen the books bring in will go toward Chiba’s last request: an annual award for excellence in reporting by a non-Japanese Asian journalist. (“The Japanese have enough money,” Chiba once explained.)
Chiba further stipulated that no funeral be held for her. Instead, Murakami and a few other friends organized “A Meeting to Think About Death and Life in Memory of Atsuko Chiba” (to take place in the same Tokyo auditorium where, a year earlier, in a voice rattling with disease, Chiba had given her final public lecture: “Dying Well Is Living Well”). The auditorium had a capacity of eight hundred, and Murakami worried that it was too large. She notified the publications in which Chiba’s columns appeared and sent out a general media alert in hopes of reaching those who had followed Chiba’s journey through her books and columns.
When the day finally came, a thousand people packed the hall, overflowing into the aisles, out the doors, sitting two to a seat: friends, family, other journalists, young women for whom Chiba had been a model, cancer patients who—thanks to Chiba—had the courage to demand more from their doctors. They listened to speakers on death and dying, to a tape of Chiba’s last speech, to messages from her friends in New York. And they listened to Fumiko Chiba, Atsuko’s mother, speak in a high, thin voice about outliving her forty-six-year-old daughter. “People say, ‘You must be very depressed that Atsuko passed away,’” she said. “I am not only sad but feeling very satisfied because Atsuko completed her life the way she wanted t
o and the way her mother could be proud of her.”
That was why the thousand came together. To mourn perhaps, but more to celebrate a woman who resolutely lived the life she desired and who, finally, died as she chose—deliberately, without fear, and as she once said she hoped: “writing . . . until the end.”
Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan: Ms. Fights for its Life
I first met Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan my junior year of college while working as an intern at Ms. Revisiting this piece, I feel I was a little impatient with them, perhaps in the way that the younger generation can be when rebelling against its elders. In truth, I deeply admire both women: for their work as well as their personal generosity toward me. This piece, which was published in November 1990, also offers a glimpse into the economics and the sexism of the traditional magazine industry, both of which, for better and for worse, have been challenged by the rise of the internet. Magazines have struggled in the new era; feminism has thrived, though so has its inverse. Finally, as my first foray into writing about girlhood this story would lead me, a year later, to begin my book Schoolgirls.
I was eleven when Tibetha Shaw showed me my first copy of Ms. magazine. Tibetha had untamed orange hair and was the only girl in the sixth grade of Minneapolis’s John Burroughs Elementary School who wore black all the time. Her mother, unlike the mothers of the rest of my friends, worked outside the home and had an apron emblazoned diagonally with three-inch-high white capital letters that said housework is bullshit, which Tibetha proudly showed me the first time she invited me over to play. I don’t think I ever met the exotic woman who probably would have insisted on being called Ms. Shaw. And I don’t recall hearing anything about Tibetha’s father. In retrospect, I imagine her parents may have been divorced. At that time, in our idyllic Midwestern community, separation was still something you did to remove the yolks from the whites of eggs; it would be a good two or three years before my classmates’ families would begin exploding around us.
My own mother subscribed to Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. She welcomed me home from school each day with freshly baked treats and milk. At Tibetha’s, there was no adult supervision. There was dust on the furniture. There was Ms. We ate Oreos and pored over the magazine, not quite understanding the anger, but grooving on the energy.
Ms. had resurrected Wonder Woman, the Amazon Princess from Paradise Island, aka Themyscira, who parried bullets with her steel bracelets and brought pernicious forces of evil to their knees with her magic golden lasso. Inspired by her, we fastened towels around our necks with clothespins and climbed onto the roof of the Shaws’ garage. The houses on Lyndale Avenue were close together, and the distance between the pointed garage roofs was slightly longer than a leggy eleven-year-old’s stride. Yet we took deep breaths and leapt—screaming, “Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman!”—flying from roof to roof and back again, towel capes streaming out behind us, buoyed up by exhilaration, discovery, and danger.
In the dead center of Times Square, there is a building wrapped by the world-famous news zipper, a building suspended over endless subway catacombs and topped by the glowing ball that drops on New Year’s Eve to the strains of Guy Lombardo. As I walk in to the ground floor, a young, female Bible-thumper looks me dead in the eyes and screams that I’m going straight to hell for unbridled forn-i-cation and for murdering babies through abortion. When I ride up to the eighteenth floor and enter the soothing pink and mauve décor of the Ms. offices, Gloria Steinem is waiting, with a different kind of damnation on her mind.
“I read thirty women’s magazines recently and it was very depressing how little they’d changed,” she says, in her ever-modulated, always polite tone of voice. “There was the occasional piece on domestic violence—unillustrated—or a survey of readers’ opinions on abortion, which is carefully equivocal. . . . Today a writer called me because she was doing a serious article about what women think of the fact that a lot of women are allowing their bra straps to show out on the street. I told her to please quote me exactly and said, ‘I think women should be able to wear anything they fucking well please.’”
That was precisely the attitude that led to the founding of Ms.
The story of Ms.’s first issue, launched as a supplement to 1971’s year-end issue of New York magazine, is the stuff of Andy Hardy movies: A group of women meeting in living rooms around New York City wanted to create a publication in which readers could find information on the women’s movement without joining any organization. Someone suggested a newsletter. “No, no,” said Brenda Feigen, an officer of NOW. “Let’s start a magazine!”
The women envisioned a publication that would be both slick and beautiful, one that would appeal to newsstand browsers who didn’t necessarily identify themselves as feminists. But when a group led by the already famous Steinem went looking for backers, everyone they approached laughed.
“We had the impossible condition that women control the magazine,” says Steinem. “There are still no women controlling women’s magazines financially. It was only because Clay Felker, for whom I’d been working as a political columnist, needed a theme for his year-end double issue that it happened. He wouldn’t pay our salaries, but he said he’d pay for the costs of producing one sample magazine if he could pick from it whatever he wanted for his own magazine.”
Three hundred thousand copies of the first bona fide issue of Ms. shipped to newsstands in January 1972. Steinem began a cross-country promotional tour, but in every city, she encountered complaining crowds. “People came up to her and said they couldn’t find the magazine anywhere,” says Joanne Edgar, the magazine’s de facto managing editor from the pilot issue until the spring of 1989. “She’d call Clay and say, ‘It’s not here! Get on the distributors!’ It turned out that all three hundred thousand copies sold out in ten days. We got thirty thousand subscribers from that one issue.”
Steinem went trolling for backers again, and this time no one snickered. She raised a million dollars, which Ms. needed to begin monthly publication, from Warner Communications.
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. If contributors to Ms. found an exuberant power in diagnosis, the magazine’s readers found strength—and relief—in being diagnosed. The letters section of Ms., significantly longer than those of other magazines, showed the publication’s effect most directly (and voyeuristically). Readers talked to each other in the pages of Ms.: chords were struck, confessions proffered, anger vented. By the end of 1973, the magazine received two hundred personal letters a day, most of them as powerful as this one, written anonymously, in December of that year:
I am writing this on a day when I could not possibly feel any greater depression, alienation or isolation. I am writing to you because I have no one, male or female, to talk to who will not try to push, cajole, threaten, even beg me into accepting my “proper” role and “duties” as a housewife and mother. . . . I had been losing courage and had started to believe there was really something wrong with me, until I began to receive your magazine. It has been literally a “lifesaver.”
The feverish new swirl of ad hoc political groups also took Ms.’s politics personally. Feminist activists dropped by the Lexington Avenue offices to offer up advice and critique what they viewed as their magazine. “Housewives came and said we weren’t doing enough on homemaker issues,” says writer and editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin. “Lesbians came by, younger women, women of color. In those days, people really made their feelings known. And we heard them out.”
As the seventies rolled on, though, the myriad concerns of the women’s movement became difficult to contain in a one-hundred-page magazine. Women channeled their energies into specific issues—reproductive rights, lesbian rights, crisis intervention—and they bumped against their differences. Antiporn and pro-sex feminists squared off, women of color felt shunted aside by white feminists, rural w
omen were bulldozed by urban professionals. Diagnosis was no longer enough. Ms. had to change with the political culture, to try to address the diversity of its constituents as well as their sophistication and occasional disillusionment.
“In the early seventies, we were riding on this rainbow of enthusiasm,” says Edgar. “We thought if you just explained the injustice of discrimination, it would go away, because everyone would see it’s not nice to discriminate against women. We were naive, to say the least.”
As students in one of the most liberal of liberal-arts colleges in the early eighties, concerned about sexism in the classroom and the curriculum, militant about Taking Back the Night, and obsessed with the quest for better access to contraception and abortion, my friends and I had numerous dinner-table disputes over whether to call ourselves “feminists.” We weren’t interested in labels of any kind, we said, let alone one that an older generation had already freighted with such finger-wagging, beleaguered connotations.
We weren’t alone in our ambivalence. Ten years after Ms. began, Ronald Reagan had been elected president and the country seemed to be hurtling backward. Membership in the National Organization for Women began a descent, which was to last until the decade’s end. For us as young women, the early successes of the women’s movement—particularly in employment and discrimination battles—made it less likely that we would rebel in the same way as our elders. Instead of feeling indebted to or proud of feminism, we saw in it the threat of permanent marginalization (Would we have successful relationships with individual men if we hated them as a group? Was the commitment to feminism irrevocable and intractable?). In a sense, the women’s movement had provided us with the luxury of inaction, of splitting hairs over semantics.
Feeling assured, however naively, of success and equal treatment in the “real world,” I was impatient with Ms.’s Horatio Alger–like tales of (women’s) triumphs against all (male) odds. With fewer real victories to report, and an acute fear of revealing divisions within the movement to a voraciously hostile outside world, Ms. fell into a pattern: it continued to remind its readers that the same old inequities were still the same old inequities, and it found smaller, individual victories to exult in, victories that often seemed sugar-coated.
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