Ms. Magazine Defied Naysayers, Set Standard For Feminist Journalism

When Ms. magazine debuted in 1972 with the premise that “women are full human beings,” the naysayers were plentiful.

One of them, syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick, called it a “C-sharp on an untuned piano. This is the note of petulance, of bitchiness, of nervous fingernails screeching across the blackboard.” Others predicted that the magazine would quickly run out of steam.

They were wrong! Ms. is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a big special issue that just hit the stands. It reprises some of the best of the magazine’s past while focusing on feminism’s future.

But the Ms. of today is a different, even more unfettered publication than the one early subscribers remember since it doesn’t depend on advertising.

Ms. took advertising in the beginning, but it challenged advertisers’ expectations that their ads would run adjacent to “complementary” editorial content. In most women’s magazines, fashion and beauty stories tended to promote the kinds of products that advertisers were hawking on nearby pages.

Well, Ms. wasn’t running the standard women’s fare on fashion and beauty and how to catch a husband. And it refused to run ads deemed insulting or demeaning to women.

When the first issue hit the newstands, women, who then were earning less than 60 cents for every dollar a man earned, responded by the thousands.

And as the years progressed, Ms. became a landmark institution in women’s rights and a magazine that defied the odds in a fiercely competitive industry.

Ms. offered the first cover stories on such topics as domestic violence and sexual harassment and identified women’s different voting patterns long before “gender gap” became common parlance. It was the first to report on alternatives to mastectomy and to document flaws in research on silicone breast implants.

Skittish advertisers accounted for much of the magazine’s shaky financial history. In 1987, it was sold to an Australian media firm, which glitzed Ms. up but couldn’t stem the flow of red ink. In 1989, Ms. was again sold, this time to Lang Communications, whom the magazine’s co-founder Gloria Steinem persuaded to take a very unconventional approach - dispensing with advertising altogether and relying solely on subscription income.

It worked. Ms., now a bimonthly with a hefty subscription fee ($45 for 6 issues) is solvent with a circulation of approximately 200,000. However, Lang Communications has since foundered and Ms. was subsequently acquired by Macdonald Communications Corp., which also owns Working Woman and Working Mother magazines.

“We discussed being ad-free in the beginning,” recalls Steinem, now Ms. consulting editor. “But we felt that we would not be taken as seriously in the magazine world if we didn’t have ads. We would be seen as some do-gooder publication and not a serious magazine. We also wanted to create a forum where advertisers would be rewarded for changing the imagery in their ads and for addressing women consumers with the kinds of products that had only been addressed to men before.