The World Split Open (41 page)

One month later, the Redstockings held a speak-out at which twelve women testified about their abortions before an audience of some three hundred persons. As she listened to the women speakers—movingly, with grief and pain, relating tales of their illegal abortions—Steinem suddenly felt as though a “great blinding lightbulb” had just been turned on. In that instant, she knew she was a feminist. “It wasn't until I went to cover a local abortion hearing for
New York
that the politics of my own life began to explain my interests. . . . Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew.” As her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun has noted, “All the humiliation of being a woman, from political assignments lost to less-experienced male writers to a lifetime of journalists' jokes about frigid wives, dumb blonds and farmers' daughters” suddenly made sense to Steinem. She, who had kept her own abortion a secret, now realized she was not alone.
³⁰

Like many other feminists, Steinem was furious with herself, for her “capitulation to the small humiliations, and my own refusal to trust an emotional understanding of what was going on, or even to trust my own experience. For instance, I had believed that women couldn't get along with one another, even while my own most trusted friends were women.”

I had agreed that women were more “conservative” even while I identified emotionally with every discriminated-against group. I had assumed that women were sexually “masochistic” even though I knew that trust and kindness were indispensable parts of my sexual attraction to any man. It is truly amazing how long we can go on accepting myths that oppose our own lives, assuming instead that we are the odd exceptions. But once the light began to dawn, I couldn't understand why I hadn't figured out any of this before.
³¹

Steinem's conversion in 1969 irreversibly altered the direction of her life. She spent the next three decades traveling, lecturing, writing, editing, publishing, and campaigning for women's liberation. In 1971, she began to think about publishing a mainstream magazine that might
reach women who didn't—and perhaps never would—read movement newsletters and newspapers. Clay Felker, editor of
New York
magazine, offered to finance a special one-time preview issue of
Ms.
The cover of the December 20, 1971, issue of
New York
showed two hands holding the new preview issue. The cover of
Ms.
featured a surreal image of a woman with eight arms, grasping a frying pan, a clock, a feather duster, a typewriter, a steering wheel, an iron, a telephone, and a mirror. Exhausted, the woman is weeping and visibly pregnant. The cover advertised such stories as “The Housewife's Moment of Truth” by Jane O'Reilly, “Sisterhood” by Gloria Steinem, “Raising Kids without Sex Roles” by Letty Pogrebin, and “Women Tell the Truth about Their Abortions” by Barbaralee Diamonstein. Inside was Johnnie Tilman's consciousness-raising article “Welfare Is a Woman's Issue,” which asked readers, “Stop for a minute and think what would happen to you and your kids if you suddenly had no husband and no savings.” Another essay, Judy Syfers's “Why I Want a Wife,” would soon become a feminist classic. With wry wit, Syfers reminded readers what wives did, what they made possible, and the fact that a wife permitted all kinds of options that most women didn't have. As Carolyn Heilbrun would later comment, “That subjects such as these, still viable and debated today, appeared in this new feminist magazine is certainly astonishing.”

For women throughout the country, it was mind-blowing. Here was, written down, what they had not yet admitted they felt, had always feared to say out loud, and could not believe was now before their eyes, in public, for all to read.
³²

The preview issue sold out so quickly that Steinem was able to publish another issue three months later. Though discouraged by other publishers and journalists, she took the plunge. The July 1972 issue sold out as soon as it hit the stands. That night,
Ms.
held a celebratory party at the New York Public Library. According to Cathy Black, an early member of the magazine's staff, the event seemed like a microcosm of the many constituencies
Ms.
would have to please.

I can honestly remember walking into the party thinking Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into. . . . There was a traditional group of women who looked like I did . . . blond hair and a ready smile. There was certainly a much more radical looking group of feminists that night. There was a wild all-women's
band, and there were some advertisers who looked like they had wandered from Mars into this group.
³³

Like the sociologist who had warned there was not enough to teach about women, the late journalist Harry Reasoner predicted, “I'll give [
Ms
.] six months before they run out of things to say.” (Years later, he graciously took it back.) But
Ms.
never ran out of things to say. All the first issues sold out and the magazine became one of the most important sources of consciousness-raising in the country.
³⁴

From the beginning,
Ms.
faced the double task of speaking to the converted
and
recruiting new readers.
Ms.
covered grassroots organizing activities of feminist activists as well as the different problems faced by minority and poor women. But more often the magazine focused on the problems encountered by its largely middle-class audience of white women.

Still, the magazine had an astonishing reach. Many ordinary housewives and working women seemed to find in its pages a reflection of their own lives and problems. Thousands of women wrote passionate letters to the magazine. When read together, they constitute a rare archive of the difficult, brave, and sometimes clumsy efforts of women to embrace the new opportunities and shoulder the new burdens that the movement had created.

Like an early electronic bulletin board, the letters section of
Ms.
functioned as a national consciousness-raising group. Here was the high drama of personal life; here was where women learned they were not alone; here was where a reader learned that however much feminism had raised expectations, daily life had a way of dampening them; here were stories of women creating new lives, only to watch them fall apart under the weight of too much responsibility, coupled with too little support from their families.

Many of the letters were filled with gratitude expressed by women whose previous idea of a women's group had been the local PTA. Such women read every issue, wrote letters to the editors, and passed
Ms.
on to friends and to daughters, with a proselytizing zeal. Their voluminous letters to the editors, whether furious or grateful, document the tremendous impact
Ms.
had on the lives of its readers.
³⁵

Hardly a topic went undiscussed. Women wrote about their dissatisfaction with their husbands and the traditional marriages they had entered years ago. They wrote about their fantasies of a future egalitarian family. They wrote about problems at work and with their health.
They wrote of the newly discovered pleasure of other women's company. They wrote about mistakes they made, about dreams lost and found, of opportunities squandered and possibilities lost. Often, they described the famous “click” that
Ms.
had popularized, the exact moment when a woman realizes her problem is not hers alone, but the result of living in a patriarchal society in which many assumptions remained unquestioned.

Conventional wisdom held that housewives didn't care about feminism, but letters poured into
Ms.
from homemakers who were beginning to view their lives through different eyes. One woman, for example, liked the feminist proposition that child-rearing and housework constituted a full-time job for which women should receive financial compensation and which should be included in the GNP. Of her “job,” she wrote:

I thought that most of my clicks were behind me, but tonight, as I cleared the table, I had a new one. I was complimenting myself (since no one else had) on a meal I'd gone to some trouble to prepare. I began to wonder why so many of us wait trembling for “the verdict” at every meal; why my mother and so many others risk antagonizing their families by having the gall to ask outright if everything is okay.

I decided it's not just neurosis. We really know they're judging even when they don't say so. House wifing is an occupation in which every single waking act is judged by the persons who mean the most to you in the world. Is the house clean? Is the food good? Was it too expensive? Are the children well behaved?

A thousand times a day our contracts come up for renewal. No wonder our nerves are shot.
³⁶

Readers proudly reported every new step they took, which, in turn, inspired other readers. “Thanks to Ms. Magazine's reporting women's accomplishments, I decided to try a man's task myself,” wrote Pat Luiz in 1974 from Oakland, California. “I and two friends broke up a sidewalk to make room for an . . . above-ground swimming pool we are assembling.” As growing numbers of women entered the labor force, readers began to share the changes they were making in their families. From Jane Wright, in Dover, Delaware, came this missive.

The day our twelve-year-old son stomped up the stairs—leaving behind the mud that had collected on his sneakers—took a shower, came back downstairs barefoot, and complained about the dirt on the stairs, was the day Mom and Dad decided we were going to raise the consciousness of our nine-, ten-, and twelve-year-olds. A family conference resulted in a family cleaning night on Friday night.

Ms.
magazine also covered every injury and injustice that feminists excavated during the 1970s, usually with a cover story. In this way, the magazine educated women about the hidden injuries of sex. Readers wrote revealing letters, in which they described, often for the first time, the devastating experiences that they had undergone in the recent or distant past. An anonymous writer wrote in 1975:

Last year I was terrorized and raped and the Philadelphia Center for Rape conducted several interviews with me to see how my personality, attitudes, sex life, and relationships had changed. The major change was in my response to street insults. I, too, had ignored them, “like a good girl,” but I found myself seething at them. I started to hurl my own choice comments and give the insulter the finger in retaliation. The topper came the day when a straight-looking man in a business suit and attache case walked up next to me while I was going to work and asked me if I wanted to fuck. I was carrying a hardback copy of the
The Gulag Archipelago
in my handbag at the time and I belted him with it. The look of fear and surprise on his face was delicious. I felt wonderful.

A story on street harassment drew numerous responses from women who resented men invading their space and demanding that they smile. Mary Louise Ho, from York, England, complained, “Men find unsmiling women threatening because we don't fit their image of the subordinate, placating, feminine female.”

They are compelled to bully us into that role because it makes them feel more secure and powerful. No doubt, to the individual man, he thinks he is being friendly and that we should appreciate his attention. It's time he learned
otherwise. The next time a man says, “I hate to see a lady so serious,” tell him, “That's your problem.”

To which Naomi Weisstein, in New York City, offered another possible retort: “How about (preferably snarling), ‘Say something funny.'”

Readers didn't hesitate to celebrate—or criticize—anything that appeared in “their” magazine. In response to a
Ms.
cover on “The Truth About Battered Wives,” in 1976, Nancy King from Baltimore, Maryland, wrote,
“Ms.
, I congratulate you on your August cover, a new low in judgment. The battered wife as fashion model—bruised, maybe, but ever young and lovely, and with her eye makeup still intact. Click, indeed!” In response to another cover that featured Lillian Carter, President Jimmy Carter's mother, Ruth Schissler from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, applauded. “I give
Ms.
a lot of credit for putting a sweet, wrinkled old woman on the cover. It was good to see a real person for a change, instead of perfect, youthful-looking models. Keep up the good work in breaking precedents.” But another woman wrote a scathing letter in which she denounced the
Ms.
editors. “I am not sure that I shall ever forgive you for the picture of Lillian Carter on the October cover. It is one of the most unkind photographs I have seen. If
Ms.
is Lillian Carter's friend, she certainly does not need enemies.”

The magazine couldn't win. When
Ms.
presented a special issue in 1976, “Why Women Don't Like Their Bodies,” Robin McKiel from Alexandria, Virginia, protested:

I was shocked that you would publish an issue probing into the reasons women don't like their bodies and then feature a skinny white woman on the cover.
That's
why women don't like their bodies—because we've been told we
should
look like the woman on the cover when most of us don't!

The editor later explained the challenge they faced. “We first tried a heavier woman . . . but that conveyed a different, old-fashioned idea: that only fat women have a body-image problem. We also tried a darker-skinned woman, but that conveyed a limited or racist message for the same reason.”

Some letters came from young women who had just had some experience that had resulted in a “click.” In 1977, an anonymous writer wrote:

After talking with my man friend and housemate of six months about my doing most of the housework, I finally presented him with a bill today for “domestic services,” approximately four hours a week at three dollars and fifty cents an hour. This so-called liberated male (he talks a good line) thought about this for two minutes, then drew up his own bill. “Sexual services”: approximately four hours a week at five dollars an hour. He even thinks his sexual services are worth more than mine! Click.
³⁷