One of the most enduring material achievements of 1970s feminism is Ms. magazine, founded and
symbolized by the formidable Gloria Steinem. At age twenty-nine, in 1963, she was already a journalist
who not only wrote the news but also featured in the news, because of her article about going undercover
as a Playboy Bunny. Her beauty helped smooth the path for her ambitions, but her unfaltering commitment
has by now guided them for over forty years. She too was a product of women’s liberation, having been
deeply influenced by the 1969 speakout on abortion mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. She
continued that speakout in print, in the 1972 first issue of Ms., by publishing the names of women who had
had illegal abortions. (One writer listed that as one of the “100 Media Moments that Changed America.”)
(^40) The editors originally intended to publish a newsletter until Steinem raised some major funds and the
first three hundred thousand copies of a real magazine sold out in eight days. Its success was one measure
of feminist enthusiasm, at a time when even women’s magazines were edited by men and when most
female journalists were confined to “human interest” rather than news assignments. Over its history Ms.
has been attacked for being too radical and not radical enough, and weathered intense debates about what
advertising to accept, if any; but it has managed to maintain its coverage of issues important to women of
all classes, ethnicities, races and ages. In 2001 the Feminist Majority Foundation took ownership of the
magazine, whose banner reads, “More than a Magazine—A Movement!”
THERE IS NO definitive end point for the women’s liberation movement, especially since many
organizations and projects begun in the 1970s are ongoing. The National Organization for Women
continues strong to this day. Indeed, some feminist activities accelerated just as others slowed. But
several phenomena marked an important transition. By the mid-1980s, a critical mass of college graduates
had studied with feminist professors, often in women’s studies courses. By the late 1980s, even larger
groups of young people, both male and female, had been raised by feminist parents. Moreover, some of
the mass media presented feminist characters and communities—even if that f-word was not mentioned—
which presented alternatives to the majority representations that remained organized around male
authority figures and heroes. In other words, feminism was moving to new generations in three ways:
formal education, parental upbringing, and mass culture. So it should come as no surprise that a revival of
feminist energy appeared early in the 1990s.
That renewed energy was also responding to an angry backlash. Led by conservatives, parts of the
Republican Party, and Christian fundamentalists, the anti-feminist opposition was funded by massive
corporate donations. The backlash also pulled in millions who imagined that feminism would somehow
destroy families. It attacked affirmative action, gay and lesbian rights, and women in politics; it
challenged and sometimes weakened laws against sex discrimination; it promoted commercial products,
from movies to advertisements, that featured women in traditional roles and suggested that women who
stepped out of them would suffer. It moved most Republicans and Protestant evangelicals from accepting
abortion rights to opposing them, and its intensive propaganda made many women who needed abortions
suffer from guilt. Ultimately the backlash even attempted to attack contraception, which almost all
Americans considered a basic necessity of life as long ago as the 1930s. The next chapter discusses
women’s activism since the 1980s in the context of that opposition.
- Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 113.
- Carol Hanisch and Elizabeth Sutherland in Notes from the First Year (New York: New York Radical Women, 1968).
- Loretta Ross, interview with Elizabeth Martínez, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, 9–10.
- Susan Faludi, “Death of a Revolutionary,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2013.
- Stacey K. Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-Raising in Third Wave Feminism,”
Communication Studies 55, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 543.