The first of July marks the anniversary of Ms magazine’s official inaugural issue, which hit newsstands in 1972 and featured Wonder Woman on its cover, towering high above a city. Truthfully, Ms debuted months earlier, on 20 December 1971, as a 40-page insert in New York magazine, where founding editor Gloria Steinem was a staff writer. Suspecting this might be their only shot, its founders packed the issue with stories like The Black Family and Feminism, De-Sexing the English Language, and We Have Had Abortions, a list of 53 well-known American women’s signatures, including Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag and Steinem herself. The 300,000 available copies sold out in eight days. The first US magazine founded and operated entirely by women was, naysayers be damned, a success.
The groundbreaking magazine’s history, and its impact on the discourse around second-wave feminism and women’s liberation, is detailed in the HBO documentary Dear Ms: A Revolution in Print, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca film festival. Packed with archival footage and interviews with original staff, contributors and other cultural icons, Dear Ms unfolds across three episodes, each directed by a different film-maker. Salima Koroma, Alice Gu and Cecilia Aldarondo deftly approach key topics explored by the magazine – domestic violence, workplace harassment, race, sexuality – with care, highlighting the challenges and criticisms that made Ms a polarizing but galvanizing voice of the women’s movement.
