Maggie Doherty in The Yale Review:
NEARLY ALL REVOLUTIONS start with a meeting. When a group of female journalists gathered at Gloria Steinem’s uptown Manhattan apartment in the winter of 1971, they were facing a common problem: none of them could get “real stories about women published.” The male editors of the major women’s magazines—called the “seven sisters,” like the colleges—would not accept pitches that did anything other than advise readers to be better, happier, more productive housewives and mothers. General-interest publications, also edited by men, were no better: according to Steinem, her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine rejected all her pitches for political stories, saying “something like, don’t think of you that way.’” Fed up and fired up, the journalists decided to start their own publication. But what kind of publication would they create, and for what kind of reader? Steinem proposed a newsletter, the kind of low-budget, low-circulation flyer that many feminist groups in New York City favored. But the lawyer and activist Brenda Feigen suggested something different: “We should do a slick magazine,” something colorful and glossy that could be sold on newsstands nationwide.
Not everyone was keen on the idea. As Vivian Gornick recalled forty years later, “Radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston…had a different kind of magazine in mind,” one that might argue against the institutions of marriage and motherhood. When it became clear that Steinem and others “wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Gornick and her radical sisters bowed out. But others hoped that a glossy magazine might strengthen the feminist movement. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thought a slick magazine could be “a stealth strategy to ‘normalize’ or ‘mainstream’ our message.” As a riposte to The New York Times, which until 1986 refused to refer to a woman by anything other than “Mrs.” or “Miss,” they decided to call their magazine Ms.
More here.