I have been flicking through 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, an anthology of articles from the first mainstream American feminist magazine, founded in 1972.
Ms. meant a great deal to me when I was young. My friends and I were rebels without a clue who defied society in summer by going braless and not shaving our legs.
Body hair is a trivial issue, but shaving legs was a real crisis for me. On the first day of seventh grade, the male math teacher ranted about the disgust he felt for girls who did not shave their legs. I went home and cried. Was I the only one targeted? Were others also ashamed? And so I shaved my legs – but only sporadically.
Later I became aware of the Women’s Liberation movement, and learned some mechanisms for coping with sexism. The thoughtful high school principal, whose name, alas, I do not remember, kindly gave me a copy of Ms. magazine. Ms. was, if not life-changing, at least a confirmation of the double standard confronting women. This eclectic Ms. anthology abounds with brilliant articles from 1972-2022 about the politics of housework, the condescending nature of male etiquette toward women, the plight of women on welfare, the FBI’s investigation of feminist groups, and a woman’s father transitioning into a woman as the writer was undergoing puberty.
There is even a very timely article about grammar, concerning the use of pronouns. In the 1985 article, “Solving the Great Pronoun Debate,” Marie Shear writes about the problem of sexist language. She believes that the simplest solution to sexist pronouns is to use “they,” “their,” and “them” instead of the third person singular. I disagree, but the “third-pronoun singular” war continues to be waged this century in the LGBTQ+ community.
I will end this post with a fascinating item from the monthly column, “Lost Women,” in 1972, by Gerda Lerner, a historian who was a founder of the academic field of Women’s History. She poses the following challenge.
Name ten women who have made important contributions to American history and development. (Please: no presidents’ wives, writers, or opera singers – and no one living today. ) If this was difficult, try naming ten men. Easy? Does that suggest something to you? There is a good deal wrong with the history you were taught, the textbooks you read in high school and college, and the culture that has largely ignored what women have experienced and contributed to human development. It is time to change the narrow, male-centered view of the past, to redefine history as the history of men and women…. Women have a right to their history too.”
I can glibly name some women politicians (Nancy Pelosi), a Supreme Court justice (Ruth Bader Ginsburg), an astronaut (Sally Ride), and Emma Goldman (anarchist and birth control proponent), but three of the four women are celebrities, which may show that I do not have a good handle on women’s history.
And judging from my news feed online, Taylor Swift is the most important American woman of the 21st century. This is not, by the way, the goal of the brilliant, popular Ms. Swift, whom I admire, but celebrity spins out of control and people begin to confuse singers and actors with those other powerful women we have such difficulty naming. (Please name them if you can!)
The first issue of Ms. was published in 1972, and I was surprised to learn it is still around.. Ms. did not incite a revolution, but it is still keeping women abreast of the issues.
