More Than A Magazine, A Movement
When Ms. was launched as a “one-shot” sample insert in New York magazine in December 1971, it was a brazen act of independence. At the time, the fledgling feminist movement was either denigrated or dismissed in the so-called mainstream media. Most magazines marketed to women were limited to advice about finding a husband, saving marriages, raising babies or using the right cosmetics.
To pay tribute to five decades of reporting, rebelling and truth-telling, Ms. gives you From the Vault, made up of some of our favorite feminist classics from the last 50 years of Ms.
From the January/February 1989 issue of Ms. magazine:
“One of the most interesting (and least reported on) developments of the last few years has been the integration of feminist and ecological concerns. … In an ecofeminist society, no one would have power over anyone else, because there would be an understanding that we’re all part of the interconnected web of life.”
As young adult fiction gains mainstream appeal and takes its awesome girl protagonists with it, we need to make sure that kick-ass action girls or vampire heroines don’t create new boxes to stuff girls into.
(This article originally appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Ms.)
50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION (Alfred A. Knopf) will be released in September and we couldn’t be more excited to share it with our readers—and with the entire world.
In 1976, in the pages of Ms. magazine, Sheila Tobias explored the topic of “math anxiety:” the tendency of women to avoid mathematics as it became more difficult, which stemmed, in part, from gender roles in academia.
“A culture that makes math ability a masculine attribute, that punishes women for doing well in math, and that soothes the slower math learner by telling her she does not have a ‘mathematical mind.'”
The U.S. is now the first country to grant equal pay for its men’s and women’s soccer teams. But for years, U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team players have repeatedly complained that they’ve been getting as little as 40 percent of the salary their male counterparts get—especially considering the women’s team has four World Cup titles and the men’s team has … none.
On November 6, 2003, President Bush signed what he called a “partial birth abortion ban,” prohibiting doctors from committing an “overt act” designed to kill a partially delivered fetus. One of the unintended consequences of this new law is that it put people in my position, with a fetus already dead, in a technical limbo.
We told our doctor we had chosen a dilation and evacuation. But I didn’t realize that pressures extending all the way to the boardrooms of hospitals, administrative sessions at medical schools and committee hearing in Congress, were going to deepen and expand my sorrow and pain.
While Coretta Scott King has been celebrated as a civil rights icon, her vision of “the beloved community” was bolder and more revolutionary than her husband Martin’s. When we retell the story of radical African American activism in the 20th century, we can finally embrace Coretta Scott King as the truly revolutionary figure she was.
*This article was originally published in the Spring 2006 issue of Ms.—a few months after Coretta Scott King’s death on January 30, 2006.*
We were devastated to hear bell hooks—scholar, writer, activist and feminist legend—died on Wednesday, Dec. 15, at her home. She was 69.
In this beloved interview from the Spring 2011 issue of Ms. between hooks and Jennifer D. Williams, hooks frankly shares her bold takes on the past, present and future of feminism, and how to *live* it—not just think it.
“On one hand we’re being told that feminism failed, but if it failed why do people want to go back and take away some basic successes of the movement?”
From the Jan/Feb 1992 issue:
“The response to my Senate Judiciary Committee testimony has been at once heartwarming and heart-wrenching. In learning that I am not alone in experiencing harassment, I am also learning that there are far too many women who have experienced a range of inexcusable and illegal activities—from sexist jokes to sexual assault—on the job.”
A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girls’ perceptions of their bodies. A strategy to counter one’s own tendency to self-objectify is to make a point of buying products, watching programs and reading publications that promote more authentic women’s empowerment
