There’s a long list of things to recognise Gloria Steinem for. But given what we do here at Women’s Agenda, I’d especially like to note Steinem’s legacy of women-led media.
Despite being told there was no market and that they would “run out of things to say”. Steinem and a team of journalists and activists, including founding editor Margaret Sloan-Hunter, launched Ms Magazine. in 1971.
The pitch for the publication? A “how to” of sorts. But not “how to make jelly” or “how to tuck bed sheets”, but rather how to take control of your own life. It had seed funding from Katharine Graham and, later, an agreement with New York Magazine to run a sample insert.
Within a fortnight, the advertisers, distributors, and the men who ran and controlled the magazine business were proven wrong about the magazine’s audience.
The 300,000 test copies of Ms. sold out in days, and 26,000 subscription orders were generated. The first edition featured a “we have had abortions” petition signed by 53 prominent women who publicly declared they had had abortions, while the procedure was still illegal in most states. It also featured Eleanor Holmes Norton writing about the “black family and feminism” and a feature on “How to Write Your Own Marriage Contract”.
Ms. was the first major magazine owned, run, and written by women. It covered the issues that other publications would not touch, and therefore enabled information about such issues to connect more women: abortion, equal pay, sexual harassment and in 1976, it became the first magazine in the US to cover domestic violence.
Ms. would sit next to women’s magazines that focused on cooking, beauty, fashion and how to support your husband and have a clean and tidy house.
And Ms. also got plenty of things wrong, attracting criticism from across the spectrum, from being too radical to not radical enough. It was forced to reckon with insufficiently representing Black women, and Alice Walker famously resigned as a contributing editor in 1986, noting the “swift alienation” she and her daughter felt from the publication.
But Steinem proved that when women own and run the masthead, the content becomes more courageous, more informative, and more necessary for women.
Building and launching the thing was huge. Anyone in publishing knows it’s one thing to put out the first edition, but it’s the second that is actually the hardest – and Steinem and her team did so, building momentum, building circulation, and continuing to cover and push the challenging issues.
Steinem edited Ms. for 15 years and consulted on the publication for another two decades. Ms. didn’t stay entirely independent, and did struggle with advertising revenue (and ultimately it was readers who carried it, including via a 1990 ad-free, reader-supported relaunch that drove circulation from 75,000 to 200,000).
The publication was sold to Fairfax (in Australia) in 1987, with Anne Summers becoming editor-in-chief and Sandra Yates president and publisher. And later, as Fairfax went private and could no longer carry its US investments, Summers and Yates bought Ms. themselves in 1988 – meaning that for a period it was owned by two Australian women in what Summers described as the second women-led management buyout in US corporate history. It was later sold to Lang Communications, and then various other owners before the Feminist Majority Foundation took it over in 2001 and still holds it today.
Steinem spent 50 years proving the audience for such publications was there.
We love celebrating women-owned and run media, and Tarla Lambert-Patel and I love being a part of this small but growing community ourselves. More than anything, we’re incredibly grateful to Gloria Steinem and everyone who fought to keep publications like Ms. alive, enabling more of us to be a little bit more daring and to build media that serves readers rather than advertisers.
Ms. hasn’t stopped running out of “things to say”, as ABC’s Harry Reasoner once said would happen within six months of launching. Fifty-four years since that first test edition, Ms. Magazine has published an obituary of its founder.
Gloria Steinem died on the 2nd of September, peacefully in her home in New York. She was 92.