Gloria Steinem’s Life Between Art and Activism

As a
founding editor of Ms., and one who remained with the magazine until
2001, Steinem did more than almost anyone to change the media environment for
women. Ms. was entirely run by women, and it solicited only female
contributors. It broke taboos about what could be published in a glossy,
running articles on lesbianism, welfare (a “woman’s issue”), abortion, and the
household division of labor. Editors solicited contributions from women of
color and put a Black woman on the cover of the June 1982 issue—to the dismay
of Southern newsstand owners, who refused
to distribute it. And Steinem and her fellow editors proved that there was,
in fact, a national audience of intelligent, curious, politically engaged women
who were willing to pay for a magazine that spoke to them about the real
problems they faced. Ms. eventually reached a circulation of 550,000,
spawned all sorts of feminist media successors, and recently published an
anthology celebrating its 50th anniversary.  

Steinem
contributed to Ms. as she could. Her first piece for the magazine, “Sisterhood,”
is a well-meaning if perhaps overly optimistic argument for building solidarity
across racial and class lines. But she spent much of her time courting
advertisers, whose money was needed to fund the production and distribution of
the magazine. In a 1990 essay for Ms., she wrote about the sense of “desperation”
she felt, trying and failing to convince advertisers to buy space. Ms.
eventually started running more ads, including ads for traditionally feminine
products, which meant cutting fiction and poetry. In that same essay, Steinem
admitted that the magazine’s “edges got smoothed down—in spite of all our
resistance.” It’s a tidy formulation, as so many of Steinem’s were, providing a
perfect image of political compromise. One imagines a counterfactual Ms.—less
successful but perhaps spikier—and wonders what writers it might have nurtured,
and to which readers it might have appealed.

But
Steinem was smooth, not spiky; there is a reason she became the figurehead of
women’s liberation and not, say, Kate Millett. She wanted
feminism to reach as many women as possible: not just the New Yorkers and the professed
radicals, but, as she put it, the “wives with white gloves welded to their
wrists” and the “students with boots who used words like ‘imperialism’ and ‘oppression.’”
She wrote—and edited, and fundraised—for the white woman, the woman of color,
the agricultural worker, the factory worker, the housewife. She knew what it
was like to need print the way one needs water. She wanted her magazine to
reach the women who needed it desperately, so they could learn that were others
who felt just the same.