Joanne Edgar
Ms. 50 Years Later: What's Been Accomplished? What's Left?
By David A. Andelman
“It was a movement, and so much more than a magazine.”
That’s how Joanne Edgar, a founding editor of Ms. Magazine, described this extraordinary innovation in journalism now celebrating its 50th year.
Alongside Ms. co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the women recounted the magazine’s early days, the daunting challenges, hard-won victories, and poignant setbacks in a wide-ranging conversation with writer Roberta Gratz at the Silurians’ November luncheon.
Part history lesson about the feminist movement in the early 1970’s by two of its key players, part primer on starting a magazine from scratch, Pogrebin and Edgar offered their insights and assessments about the progress made in winning equal rights for women – and how much remains to be done.
Gratz helped set the tone, recalling her early days as a New York Post “copy boy” in 1963. “I answered to ‘boy’ as reporters and editors needed someone to carry copy from one point to the other. I never thought about it, or even felt awkward, answering to ‘boy’ – until the first Black copy boy came along, and they all switched to ‘copy’ instead of ‘boy.’”
Pogrebin recalled Ms. Magazine began in “a tiny, tiny, tiny three-room suite, really three closets put together.”
A big break was engineered by Gloria Steinam, then a writer at New York Magazine. She persuaded Clay Felker, New York’s publisher, to preview Ms. on the cover of New York and say, “this is your chance to preview this radical amazing revolutionary new magazine.”
“Every article was like a wakeup call,” Pogrebin said,
Though envisioned as a monthly, the first issue sold out in eight days. “Not just in urban areas or on college campuses,” Pogrebin said, “but in tiny little towns in Texas,”
Edgar recalled, “Two-hundred-thousand people sent in the little (subscription) cards.”
The offer was a year’s subscription for six dollars. Even in 1971-72, six dollars couldn’t cover costs. “We were at the point of going to press, so the only way we could change it at that point—way before computers—was to cut out the ‘6’ and turn it upside down and make it a ‘9’. So we charged $9 a year for the first subscriptions.” [Today, a year’s print subscription is $30.]
Not long after, Kenny Rosen brought Bill Sarnoff to a meeting, but only after receiving assurances that Gloria Steinem would be there. “We ended up with a check for a million dollars. This was real money back then,” Edgar said.
Because the point of Ms. was to be women-owned – “We’d control it” – Sarnoff agreed to be a minority owner.
The magazine, Pogrebin said, allowed “women to feel heard. They weren’t just asking for 43 ways to make hamburger or how to turn potholders into lampshades, how to satisfy your husband in bed after you’ve put four kids in the tub and in bed. Here we were saying, tell the truth about your life.”
Pogrebin and Edgar reminded the audience that back then separate “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted” job listing were the norm, as was dedicated women’s pages. Even The New York Times demurred in allowing women to use “Ms.” instead of Miss or Mrs.
“They’d write an article about Gloria, and they would say Miss Steinem of Ms. Magazine,” Pogrebin said. Eventually, the Times changed.
Ms. selected its articles “based on what was happening in women’s lives around the country and also around the world,” Edgar said. The magazine also sponsored the Ms. Metric Mile race, a concert at the Philharmonic, and lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment “until we became a non-profit and we couldn’t directly lobby anymore.”
As for today, Edgar said, “It’s a different need now because times have changed. We’ve gone through big changes, some victories, a lot of backlashes,” such as the abortion issue.
Indeed, abortion led to one of the most memorable issues—a two-page spread that headlined “We have had abortions” with signatures from 53 women including Billie Jean King, Judy Collins, Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, Grace Paley, Barbara Tuchman, and Nora Ephron, “who’d never had an abortion but insisted on signing anyway.”
Today “the movement is everywhere,” Pogrebin said. “If you have a daughter who got discriminated against playing the sport she wanted, or she’s part of a team that has to do their practice sessions in a smaller gym without any lights. ‘Why is my team underfunded? Why don’t we have clean uniforms?’”
Which brought up the generational issue. “My daughters have no idea what it was like to be a working mother at our time,” Gratz said, “and our granddaughters just take it for granted. I’m not sure that they have the same urge to change at this point.”
