In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

NWSA Journal 13.1 (2001) 193-194



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Yours in Sisterhood: Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism


Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism by Amy Erdman Farrell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, 232 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $16.95 paper.

Ms. magazine smashed onto American newsstands in 1972, creating a publishing sensation. Its editors dated the first issue "Spring 1972" because they feared it would take a long time to sell. Instead, the first issue sold out in eight days. The early Ms. claimed 500,000 subscribers and a pass-along readership of 3 million. By 1979, though, the magazine was in financial trouble, reorganizing under the umbrella of the Ms. Foundation, a non-profit originally founded to benefit from profits from the magazine.

Yours in Sisterhood documents the exhilarating rise and agonizingly slow decline of Ms. as a magazine circulated to a wide audience. The magazine still exists today, but with a small, specialized circulation.

Farrell has written a well-researched and carefully considered history of Ms. from its inception through the early 1990s. She interviewed many of the editorial staff, who also gave her access to the magazine's internal records. Overall, she seeks to ask the question: Why did Ms. die as a popular magazine? And secondarily: Is it possible for a feminist publication to survive as a large-circulation periodical with its revenue based in advertising?

The basic story of the demise of Ms. as a popular magazine, we already know. The publication was not able to pull enough advertisers. Some advertisers did not want to associate their products with feminism. Ms. turned away others because they demanded that the magazine run articles favorable to advertisers' products alongside their ads. Farrell provides detailed documentation of this problem, but she does not stop with this relatively simplistic description of Ms.'s collapse.

Farrell also talks about cultural shifts in the late 1970s/early 1980s. By the end of the 1970s the magazine's middle-class, feminist readers had been absorbed into the system. Feminist activists, she says, "moved into existing organizations like schools, corporations, churches and the military [End Page 194] to enact changes" (101). Having become insiders, and facing the 1980s backlash documented so well by Susan Faludi, American women tended to back away from the radicalism of the early 1970s.

In the same time period Ms. acquired competitors like Savvy, Working Woman, and Working Mother. While advocating success in the workplace, these magazines "ignored any connection between women's lives and the oppression created by racism, poverty, and ageism, refusing the responsibility of sisterhood that Ms. promised to fulfill," notes Farrell (105).

The author makes a distinction between popular feminism and intellectual feminism. By the early 1980s, intellectual feminism was moving away from advocacy informed by the needs only of the white, upper-middle class; yet popular feminist thinking remained concentrated on the idea of equality in the workplace. As intellectual feminism moved away from popular feminism, Ms. and its readers parted.

In 1978 the magazine hired consultants from the publishing industry to analyze its collapsing financial position. The consultant's noted, "It appears that once the 'women's movement' picked up steam, the other women's magazines started to editorialize and develop articles on subjects that were strictly Ms.'s domain. . . . In short, other women's publications, and sometimes even men's, started to steal much of Ms.'s editorial 'thunder'" (107).

The consultant's advice: Become a mainstream women's magazine. But the editors of Ms. would not do this. They had launched their publication for idealistic, not commercial reasons, and they remained idealistic. Through the 1980s, the magazine slowly declined in circulation and refocused on what Farrell calls an "elitist" audience interested in intellectual feminism.

While she understands and sympathizes with the process that brought Ms. down, Farrell laments its end. She calls for another attempt at feminist, commercial publishing. Popular culture, she says, "is the most powerful arena in which ideas are created and circulated. To abdicate this...

pdf

Share