Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  “My husband used to leaf through Ms. and say, ‘This is a cheering squad for women,’” says feminist writer and occasional Ms. contributor Katha Pollitt. “‘They’d write a positive article about any woman who was doing anything, regardless of whether it was interesting.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, there’s a place for that. It’s like how our grandparents were always thrilled when a Jew did things.’ Part of it is opening new roles.

  “But it’s true that they didn’t like to run unfavorable book reviews. And they bought into this 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.”

  “I remember feeling, when we were celebrating women coal miners, that we were celebrating black lung and we should think about that,” says Pogrebin. “Just because you got a piece of the pie doesn’t mean the pie wasn’t full of worms. But the counterargument was that women wanted these jobs and they’re proud of themselves and if they want to take this chance, they have a right to take it. As much as it bothers me, it’s a point of view. You can’t be a purist in support of women.”

  Ms. may have been flawed, but it was the only women’s magazine that showcased intelligence, placed some premium on substance over style, and tried consistently to push independent voices into the mass market. I wanted to be one of those voices. So I leapt at the chance in 1982 to leave the flatlands of Ohio to take an internship at Ms., working for then–contributing editor Robin Morgan on Sisterhood Is Global, an anthology of women’s writings worldwide.

  When I arrived in New York, the magazine was financially imperiled. Paper and postage costs (the most expensive aspects of magazine production) had skyrocketed. In desperation, Steinem and publisher Pat Carbine had turned Ms. into a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization in 1979. Although the move prevented Ms. from continuing to rate and endorse political candidates, the postage break alone saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and under the auspices of the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication, Steinem could raise funds more aggressively.

  I spent nine months hovering on the periphery of the magazine, doing part-time fact-checking work to support myself while I plumbed statistics on policies and practices of eighty countries on contraception, abortion, violence against women, family law, labor law, suffrage, and women’s history, in research for Morgan’s book. The editors, for the most part, were warm and friendly; I admired the genuine financial and emotional sacrifices they’d made to keep their magazine and movement alive. I was starstruck by conversations in which Andrea Dworkin apprised Gloria Steinem of her encounters with William F. Buckley Jr., while, nearby, Robin Morgan chatted on the phone with Kate Millett. But because of the enormous injustice I was uncovering in my research, I was also going through a process of discovery, a politicization that I felt these women were well beyond.

  When I returned to college, I read Mary Daly, Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin, Kathleen Barry, Audre Lorde, and Nawal El Saadawi. I read everything I could get my hands on. But I still only skimmed Ms. for an occasional news flash, even though I wanted badly to return to the magazine after graduation. Now an ardent feminist committed to the idea of writing about women in a political way, I couldn’t imagine where else I would work. Redbook? Vogue? Middle-class, middle-management slicks like Savvy and Working Woman? I began to understand why most of the editors of Ms. had remained entrenched there for ten years; Ms. was a beachhead in a war to change cultural patterns, but the invading army still hadn’t gotten past the sand.

  Unable to find a niche at Ms., where every would-be feminist journalist in America applied for a job each year, and unwilling to give up the dream of working at a glossy magazine, I called Robin Morgan that summer and told her I’d taken a job at Esquire.

  “Esquire?” she said. “Oh, Peggy, how could you?”

  I answered flatly, “I didn’t have a choice.”

  As a young editor at Esquire, I quickly learned that the magazine industry is among the most cutthroat and sexist industries in the country, primarily paid for—and often dictated to—by advertisers. In spite of spiraling production costs, there were about 650 more publications on the newsstands in the mid-eighties than the mid-seventies. Most mass-market publications cut subscription rates so low that they actually lost money on them, under the assumption that the extra body count would lure advertisers in this extremely competitive market.

  Many magazines weren’t above promising a little extra incentive to curry advertising favor. When I was editing Esquire’s semiannual travel section, the magazine’s advertising department regularly provided me with a list of vacation spots to cover. Readers, of course, were none the wiser. A few years later, Vanity Fair stood accused of running adulatory profiles of designers Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein—two of the publication’s bigger advertisers. And, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, once the home of Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell, recently toned down a piece on the history of environmentalism by former Sierra Club Books editor John G. Mitchell to satisfy the needs of a toothless Earth Day advertorial section.

  These pressures are doubly fierce for magazines perceived as “political” or, in industry parlance, as “hostile editorial environments.” Nothing scares off advertisers like controversy, and nothing spells controversy like politics. Mother Jones, The Nation, Harper’s, and The Atlantic all rely on big-money donors or wealthy owners to supply hundreds of thousands of dollars in deficit spending each year. Without such a deep pocket, Ms. was increasingly at the mercy of advertisers. And advertisers rarely showed much mercy.

  Steinem virtually stopped editing after the pilot issue; she and publisher Pat Carbine devoted themselves full-time to finagling more than $2 million worth of ads a year. “Some advertisers would spit on the magazine,” Steinem remembers. “There was a food advertiser in California who made us take him to the world’s most expensive dinner, which we could ill afford. After the meal, he threw the magazine on the table and said, ‘I wouldn’t advertise in this fucking piece of shit if it were the last magazine on earth.’ People loved to have us make presentations with the purpose of humiliating us.”

  “[Prospective advertisers] took us personally,” says Pogrebin. “They didn’t want to buy an ad in Ms. because it was the reason their wives left them, or because their product showed motherhood as Madonna and child and we’d show pictures of bloody, natural birth.”

  Without the promise of editorial obeisance, Ms. didn’t stand a chance of tapping into the gold mine of cosmetic and fashion ads (the fact that shilling those products in the magazine would have been somewhat antithetical to the Ms. message is, perhaps, a contradiction best pondered by the financially solvent). Instead, the magazine looked like it was produced for fast-driving cross-addicts: its ad pages were almost exclusively the province of cigarettes, hard liquor, and cars.

  Those advertisers also had their unspoken demands. Mary Thom, an editor of Ms. since its first issue, admits that the magazine went light on its coverage of women and smoking: “We tried to cover those issues when there was news—when research on fetal alcohol syndrome came out, that kind of thing. But to do a major job on addiction or on cross-addiction meant that those advertisers couldn’t be in the book. So we didn’t cover it in an in-depth, ongoing way.”

  And Steinem remembers nearly coming to blows over an offensive portrayal of Volkswagen. “There was a piece about Nazi Germany by Andrea Dworkin in which she had used ‘Porsche’ [which is distributed by Volkswagen],” she says. “Volkswagen doesn’t interfere at all; they don’t ask anything of you, unlike women’s products. Except they don’t want to be in a piece about Nazi Germany. It was too late to change the fact that the ad was in the issue and Porsche was in the piece. So I changed Porsche to
‘expensive car.’ Andrea was furious. Really, really, seriously furious. It really jeopardized our friendship. And I felt really victimized. I said, ‘Andrea, you don’t understand this.’ I tried to explain. Now I realize she was right. But at the time, in the context—some of us weren’t making salaries; we didn’t know if we could meet the printing costs; we were making ends meet with contributions. This was one of the few advertisers who wouldn’t interfere. . . .”

  Finally, the pressure of running at a constant deficit, reducing or going without salaries, and never knowing if the next issue would be the last became too much. The Ms. Foundation began hunting for someone to buy its major asset in late 1986. “I can’t even begin to express what the pressures were like,” Steinem says with despair in her voice. “It was giving us all ulcers and sweaty palms. We knew that if we closed our doors, that we could wrongly be seen as damaging the women’s movement. Like losing the Equal Rights Amendment. I can’t tell you how terrible that feels.”

  Anne Summers, an Australian feminist who served for three years as chief advisor on women’s issues to Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, had been spinning her wheels as the U.S. political correspondent for a John Fairfax, Ltd., newspaper when she heard Ms. was for sale. Together with Sandra Yates, who had come Stateside to launch a smart-talking publication for teenage girls, she convinced Fairfax to bid for Ms. The girls’ magazine, they reasoned, could become the cash cow that would keep its older, prestigious sister afloat.

  “Fairfax was clearly a better choice than Hearst or Condé Nast, who would’ve turned it into a totally conventional magazine,” says Steinem now. “We would’ve liked to have the money to go on ourselves, but we never thought we were the only people who could do this.” When the deal closed in October 1987, Summers—who, with her platinum hair and black, thick-framed, round glasses has a look as singular as Steinem’s—was named editor of Ms.; Yates was named publisher.

  And nothing worked out as they planned.

  In some ways, what Anne Summers was trying to do was to resurrect the initial vision of Ms., but to do it eighties and nineties style: “People my age and a bit younger would tell me, ‘I used to read Ms., but then it stopped doing anything for me and I haven’t read it since the early eighties,’” she told me one morning in her Upper West Side condominium. “I think a lot of women, as they started to get good jobs, started having kids, saw themselves developing in all kinds of ways the magazine wasn’t keeping up with. I thought there was a constituency out there that I could claim.”

  Under Summers, who took the magazine back to a for-profit status, Ms. could rate political candidates for the first time in ten years. The magazine showed new edge during the 1988 presidential campaign, when it offered updates on candidates’ positions on child care, abortion, and women’s employment issues. But Summers wanted to be a player on Madison Avenue as well as Capitol Hill. To create a “conducive” editorial environment, she introduced a column about gardening to the magazine. She also launched a controversial—and embarrassing—attempt at a fashion section: “Personal Appearances,” which featured the everyday wardrobe secrets of prominent feminists, ran for seven issues. “That was a disaster,” Summers says now. “It just put advertisers off because women were wearing their own clothes, which weren’t necessarily fashionable. And readers said that they’d rather hear about a woman’s ideas.”

  Summers never had a chance to find out if her new ideas for Ms. would work. Six months after buying the magazine, Fairfax fell into hard times and began scaling back operations, starting with its new U.S. holdings. Frantic to keep control of both Ms. and Sassy, Summers and Yates formed Matilda Publications, and raised $20 million—enough to buy the two magazines and infuse them with capital. But Citicorp Venture Capital, Inc., one of Matilda’s biggest backers, took a particularly active interest in its investment. Matilda agreed to ambitious quarterly performance goals, which relied on everything going right. There was no room for slippage of any kind. Two weeks later, in mid-July 1988, things didn’t just slip, they crashed: six major advertisers pulled out of Sassy.

  From its first issue in March 1988, Sassy had been a smash. Falling somewhere between the prom-queen primness of Seventeen and the tackiness of Teen, it tried to speak to what was really going on with teenage girls. Talking in an occasionally grating teen argot (like, you know, pointing out when the Red Hot Chili Peppers acted like total dags), it ran articles on previously taboo subjects: drawn in by promises of lipstick lessons and dish on Johnny Depp, the fourteen- to nineteen-year-old audience was also instructed on how to protest the antichoice parental-notification rule, offered a condom update, introduced to gay teens, and educated about AIDS. In fact, with its younger and less judgmental readers, the early Sassy seemed to have found that delicate balance between frivolity and feminism, which often eluded Ms. Within seven issues, it matched its éminence grise, with four hundred fifty thousand subscribers.

  Then, after the magazine caught the attention of a couple of reactionary moms from Wabash, Indiana, two fundamentalist Christian groups launched a letter-writing zap against the magazine. Six of Sassy’s biggest advertisers (including Revlon, Maybelline, Noxell, Gillette, and the ostensibly progressive Reebok) pulled their ads.

  “We didn’t realize initially how serious it was or how long it would go on,” says Summers. “We thought advertisers would be back in a few months. But Sassy had become controversial. Big advertisers who said they’d come in after the second year, like Procter & Gamble and Bristol-Myers, backed off. Small advertisers got nervous. The impact was catastrophic. Some months in early 1989, Ms. had more ads than Sassy; then we really knew we were in trouble.”

  Major advertisers pulled out of Ms., too. While the number of ad pages went up slightly, to 503 in 1987 (still down from the old Ms.’s 555 in 1985), by the next year that figure had dropped to 343. “It became very clear that we’d become a marginal buy,” says Mary Thom. “When ads began to go down in the industry, we were the first to be cut off the schedule.”

  Summers became painfully aware of stories that would insult advertisers. As with Steinem, her breaking point came when she perceived a threat to the magazine’s much-needed car advertising. When columnist Barbara Ehrenreich proposed an acid satire about fast cars, Summers balked and asked her to write something else (the column eventually appeared in Mother Jones). “I felt shocked to be running into that kind of censorship at Ms.,” says Ehrenreich. “And if it was any other place, as I told Anne, I would’ve quit right there. But because it was Ms. and I was trying to be understanding about the difficulties of surviving, I shrugged and did something else for them.”

  Finally, even the magazine’s covers fell under advertisers’ scrutiny. “The worst thing I ever did was change the cover because of advertisers,” Summers admits. “We made the mistake of telling them once that Hedda Nussbaum [the abused partner of Joel Steinberg, a New York City lawyer who murdered his six-year-old daughter in 1987] was going to be on the cover. She’d been on Newsweek, and it was a legitimate news photo and an issue that Ms. readers were interested in. But that kind of cover is not tolerated in women’s magazines. They want nice covers. We lost seven advertisers, but four came back when we promised to change it. We had two days to put together a new cover. It was a naked woman, a grainy picture that said, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Women & Estrogen, Hedda & Joel, The Supreme Court & Abortion.’”

  Citicorp waltzed in to end Matilda’s misery just as the July 1989 issue was about to ship. The company went back on the block, its attractiveness enhanced by the slowly recovering Sassy. Summers had tried desperately to find a partner who would allow her to keep the magazine going, but even sympathetic prospects, like multimillionaire media heiress Sallie Bingham, turned her down. “Ms. had been around for seventeen years,” Summers says, “and every deep pocket was exhausted. The usual suspects had already been approached in the past and either had given money or didn’t want to give.”

  In August 1989, Dale Lang, who owns W
orking Woman, Working Mother, and once owned McCall’s, signed a letter of intent to buy Ms. and 70 percent of Sassy (Citicorp retained the other 30 percent). Lang promptly left for a motorcycling holiday in Europe, without announcing his plans for either publication, but the word on the street was that he was not interested in Ms.

  “He started running the publication about two months before he officially owned it,” one publishing insider told me. “He was trying to sell ads in trios—Sassy, Working Woman, Working Mother, but not Ms. He made no statement supporting Ms., so ads naturally evaporated. To Madison Avenue, it looked like not even the white knight was supporting the publication, that he was actually trying to undermine it. Finally, there was an issue on the boards ready to go with only seven pages of ads. And he refused to print it.”

  On October 13, 1989, Summers turned full control of Matilda Publications over to Lang, and Ms., the publication founded on the principle of female self-determination, became the domain of a man. He immediately suspended publication. Editors were allowed to stay on, but the ad staff was fired. Some learned their fate from that morning’s Wall Street Journal.

  Summers still broods over the failure of her mass-circulation Ms. “I’ve thought a lot about what I’d do differently,” she says. “We should’ve taken some stronger stands on some issues. I think I was treading softly, very conscious of potential criticism for tampering with this American institution. That was a mistake. I should’ve done savage profiles. We were too soft.