An Oral History of �Ms.’ Magazine -- New York Magazine Ms. staff meeting in June 1972. From left: Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Suzanne Levine, Mary Thom, Harriet Lyons, Patricia Carbine, and Ruth Sullivan. (Photo: Nancy Crampton) In the years leading up to the birth of Ms., women had trouble getting a credit card without a man’s signature, had few legal rights when it came to divorce or reproduction, and were expected to aspire solely to marriage and motherhood. Job listings were segregated (ï¿½Help wanted, maleï¿½). There was no Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded athletic programs); no battered-women’s shelters, rape-crisis centers, and no terms such as sexual harassment and domestic violence. Few women ran magazines, even when the readership was entirely female, and they weren’t permitted to write the stories they felt were important; the focus had to be on fashion, recipes, cosmetics, or how to lure a man and keep him interested.

ï¿½When I suggested political stories to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, my editor just said something like, ï¿½I don’t think of you that way,’ ï¿½ recalls Gloria Steinem. ï¿½It was all pale male faces in, on, and running media,ï¿½ says Robin Morgan, who was Ms.’s editor in the late eighties and early nineties. But in the mid-sixties, feminist organizations such as New York Radical Women,Redstockings, and NOW began to emerge. On March 18, 1970, about a hundred women stormed into the male editor’s office of Ladies’ Home Journal and staged a sit-in for eleven hours, demanding that the magazine hire a female editor-in-chief. Says feminist activist-writer Vivian Gornick, ï¿½It was a watershed moment.

It showed us, the activists in the women’s movement, that we did, indeed, have a movement.ï¿½ See Also: • Emily Nussbaum on the Rise of the Feminist Blogosphere By age 29, Gloria Steinem had forged a reputation as a smart, pithy writer with her 1963 exposé in Show magazine about going undercover as a Playboy Bunny. She was a staff writer at New York Magazine when it debuted in 1968, along with Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe. Radicalized by an abortion speak-out, which she covered for New York in 1969, Steinem started spending more time thinking, writing, and giving talks about feminism. She testified in the Senate in 1970 on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, and co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. That same year, she helped launchMs. magazine,which became the first periodical ever to be created, owned, and operated entirely by women. A forty-page excerpt of its preview issue was published in the December 20, 1971, issue of this magazine.

Here are the stories of the women who were there. Gloria’s Living Room In early 1971, Gloria Steinem and attorney/activist Brenda Feigen hosted a crowd of female journalists at two meetings in their respective apartmentsï¿½Steinem’s in the East Seventies, Feigen’s in Tudor Cityï¿½to brainstorm ideas for a possible publication for women. Brenda Feigen (co-founder, with Steinem, of the Women’s Action Alliance, 1971): It was amazing: jammed with well-known women writers, journalists, and activists. All of them said, ï¿½We can’t get real stories about women published.ï¿½ Jane O’Reilly (contributor, 1971ï¿½90s): People were sitting on the floor, on chairs, hanging from rafters. When it came to all the topics proposed, it struck me as being like your first trip to Europe: You think you have to go to every single country because you might never get to go back.

Article Ideas From a Confidential Memo Some Notes on a New Magazine (4/71): *THE POLITICS OF SEX *DON’T BELIEVE HIM WHEN HE SAYS POLITICS BEGIN IN WASHINGTON. POLITICS BEGIN AT HOME. *HOW NOT TO GO THROUGH MENOPAUSE *A SECRETARY IS AN OFFICE WIFE *SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE LIBERATED PAT NIXON *ï¿½OF COURSE, I’M ALL FOR EQUAL PAY, BUT ï¿½ ï¿½ *HOW MARRIAGE KILLS LOVE Susan Braudy (co-editor/writer, 1973ï¿½78): After oneï¿½meeting, Gloria said, ï¿½I’ve been thinking about aï¿½newsletter.ï¿½ Letty Cottin Pogrebin (coï¿½founding editor, 1971ï¿½89) [Editor’s note: Letty is the mother of Abigail Pogrebin, the author of this oral history.]: There were lots of newsletters and radical broadsheetsï¿½things mimeographed on newsprint or paper towelsï¿½that never built an audience.

Feigen: I said, ï¿½What do you mean newsletter? You’re famous. We should do a slick magazine.ï¿½ Gloria said, ï¿½I don’t know if there’s a demand for it.ï¿½ I said, ï¿½Of course there is.ï¿½ Pogrebin: I think that being slick and being sold on newsstands was a stealth strategy toï¿½ï¿½normalizeï¿½ or ï¿½mainstreamï¿½ our message. Some feminists would have preferred the women’s movement to continue speaking toï¿½theï¿½converted. Vivian Gornick (feminist and writer): For radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston, we had a different kind of magazine in mind. We came out against marriage and motherhood. Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with Establishment figures; we had only ourselves. It very quickly became obvious at that first meeting that they wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies’ Home Journal. We didn’t want that, so they walked away with it. Gloria Steinem: The Original Ms.

| The Huffington Post Gloria Steinem: The Original Ms. 06/15/2012 09:02 am ET | Updated Aug 15, 2012 480 Marlo Thomas Award-winning actress, author and activist When I first met Gloria Steinem more than 40 years ago, the world was a different place. The women's movement was just beginning, and so Gloria became not only my new friend, but also my touchstone on the many issues that were starting to confront us on the front lines of feminism. We were part of an important new conversation that was going on all across the country. It was apparent that women needed to talk to each other and they needed a place where their minds could meet. So in 1972, Gloria co-founded that place: Ms. magazine, which would instantly become -- and remain -- the indispensable handbook of the women's movement. This week, the City of New York honored Gloria and the editors and writers of Ms. on the occasion of the magazine's 40th anniversary, and so I thought it would be illuminating to ask my soul-sister about the cultural and historical impact of the magazine.

Here's what she had to say. --MT Why did you decide to launch Ms. Magazine? Was it a conscious response to the other women's magazines that were out at the time? We just wanted to work for a magazine that reflected the changes in our lives. Other women's magazines were in a system that rarely allowed that. I'd been a longtime freelance writer for Glamour and the Ladies Home Journal, so I knew that editors tried their best to include one non-ad-related article and maybe a short story, but that was the most they could do. Remember, women's magazines started out as catalogues with a little "complementary copy" for the ads that were about fashion, food, entertaining and so on. I remember a beauty editor who got fired just for writing that young women probably didn't need moisturizers. There were advertisers who made it clear that they wouldn't buy an ad in an issue with "depressing articles or large-size fashion." It was way too much to expect those magazines to publish news about carcinogens in hair dye, or which clothes were made in sweatshops -- much less a petition from well-known women who'd had abortions and supported reproductive freedom. This pressure from ads still explains why Ms.

-- and other smaller, woman-controlled magazines like Bitch and Bust -- have diverse articles and global news and humor and fiction and exposés that you can't find anywhere else. We were way too optimistic in thinking that Ms. could change ad-dependent women's magazines. But I do see hopeful signs. For instance, there's a whole movement of young women on the web calling on women's magazines to publish at least a few photos that aren't photoshopped to make women and girls feel bad about their real bodies. But if women and girls are to have truthful media they can count on -- in print or on the web -- they'll have to pay for them, as we pay for books, instead of media so heavily subsidized by ads. If you didn't name the magazine Ms., what would your backup choice have been? Our first idea was Sojourner, after (slavery abolitionist and women's rights activist) Sojourner Truth, but people thought it was a travel magazine. Then we came up with Sisters, but people thought it was for nuns! I liked Bimbo -- in the spirit of making bad words good, like Slut Walks does now - but that took explaining. So we chose Ms.

because it was not only symbolic, but short and took up less cover space. We actually found that word in secretarial handbooks of the 1950s, as a way of dealing with the embarrassment of not knowing whether a woman was married or not. But later, we discovered it was on a tombstone from the 1700s; and in England, it had been in use for centuries as an abbreviation for "Mistress." Since even children were called Master and Mistress, it meant female without marital status. What kind of impact were you hoping to have when you launched? Can you think of five words that were the mission of Ms. magazine when it first rolled off the presses? We wanted to arrive in women's lives as a portable friend with information, support, community, laughter and new ideas. We also didn't want to embarrass the movement by failing. I can't tell you how relieved and happy we were when the Preview Issue -- cover-dated "Spring," in case it sat on newsstands for months -- sold out in just over a week. What kind of backlash was there? Anything feminist was the object of ridicule, and especially that there would be enough interest to support a national feminist magazine.

I remember a few subscribers who asked if it could be sent in a plain brown wrapper! Text Continues Below of 13 Ms. staff meeting in June 1972. From left: Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Suzanne Levine, Mary Thom, Harriet Lyons, Patricia Carbine, and Ruth Sullivan. Share this slide: Nancy Crampton What kind of response did you get from the media? Harry Reasoner famously went on air to say Ms. couldn't last. The editor of Newsweek had taken me to lunch to warn me that we could only succeed if we positioned ourselves against lesbians - so of course, we included a lesbian article in the first issue. The New York Times printed the name of the magazine, but called all of us "Miss" - and refused to use Ms. as an optional form of address for the next fifteen years. An advertising guy sent me Ms. with every reference to sex highlighted with a yellow marker, to show why he would never advertise. Mostly, it was reported pretty accurately, but treated as an oddity that couldn't last. Describe to me the typical reader of Ms. magazine that first year of its publication.

What do you think that woman is doing today? You can't describe the Ms. reader except by state of mind. Back then, the typical reader letter said some version of, "At last, I know I'm not alone!" I remember a 70-year-old who was taking her birth-name back, and a seven-year-old who wrote in crayon to say the girls were trying to get more room on the playground -- and there was every age and situation in between, from women executives trying to get equal pay to women trying to get off welfare. We were always what researchers call a "psychographic," not a demographic. If I had to name our reader's single most shared characteristic -- then and now -- I would say it's hope. Which issues were the most controversial in their time? Any issue of equality was controversial to people -- including some women -- who felt that the normal male/female relationship was 60/40 or 70/30. Even 50/50 felt threatening. Erotica and pornography were controversial, even though the difference is present in the words.

("Eros" means sensual love and "love" implies mutuality and free choice, while "porne" means female slaves and so the absence of mutuality.) But some felt that criticizing pornography was criticizing sex itself, and others that erotica couldn't co-exist with current inequality. This controversy is still out there, though now that millions more women have actually seen pornography because of the Internet, there's more understanding that it's about domination and violence. I'm happy to say that, now, there's a T-shirt that says: "Eroticize Equality!" In the early days of the magazine, it was considered controversial to put a black woman on the cover. But you did that anyway. What was the reaction from distributors? Magazines are very dependent on newsstand distributors, and they were telling us that in the south that Ms. wouldn't even be taken out of boxes if we put a black woman on the cover, which we knew could be true; and that if we were on the stands, only black women would buy us, which we knew was untrue. In any case, Ms. did it anyway. We also put older women on the cover, and women who weren't thin, and Billie Jean King with braces on her teeth.

Where there any issues that were off-limits in Ms. Magazine? Since all issues are women's issues and transformed if they're covered as if women mattered, I can't remember one that was off limits per se. As a remedial magazine, we probably were least likely to cover whatever was already being well covered. What were some of your favorite covers? Why? My all-time favorite cover was a painting by Miriam Wosk, a Krishna-like woman with many arms, with symbols of women's occupations in each hand, with a baby growing out of her stomach, and with a tear running down her face. I loved the universality of its symbols and that the woman was blue like Krishna. More than 30 years later when I was in India -- where I lived for a couple of years after college -- a group of Dalit women in Bangalore were doing a small magazine for villagers, and they used the same image on the cover, not because of Ms. but for the same reasons we did: to express women's many roles.

Otherwise, my favorite covers were the ones that made news: the 1976 cover of a woman with a bruised face, making us the first national magazine to address domestic violence; a cover about men and feminism; and one about sexual harassment, that a major chain refused to display on its newsstands. What's the one thing that gives you most hope about the younger generation's concept of feminism today? The least hope? Young women have higher standards and better shit detectors than we ever did. What gives me the least hope is that younger women are still less likely to vote. What would you still like to see on the cover of Ms. Magazine? The first woman of color who's President of the United States. Also reproductive freedom as a global human right. And one generation of children raised without violence, including the violence of roles based on how they got born. If the publisher of Ms. called tomorrow and said, "Ms. has outlived its usefulness -- time to close up shop," what would your first line of defense be? An eye and ear exam for whoever said that.

Walter Cronkite once said, "If I could do it all over again, I'd be a song-and-dance man." What's your secret other profession? A full-time writer. Why have you never asked Hugh Hefner to pose for a centerfold in Ms. Magazine? Even I, who can measure the ways Hefner has been a blight on humanity -- men as well as women -- wouldn't put him through that humiliation! See Ms. Magazine's most iconic covers: Ms. Magazine: 40 Years of Covers Ms. Magazine: 40 Years of Covers 1 Ms. Magazine and Gloria Steinem Knowledge Base > Political Science > Women's Studies Ms. Magazine and Gloria Steinem Ms. is an American liberal feminist magazine co-founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem and founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin together with founding editors Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock, that first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine. GW senior majoring in psychology with a minor in mind-brain studies. Lover of the brain, dramatic writing and AP Style. Curated Facts Ms.

was a brazen act of independence in the 1970s. At the time, the fledgling feminist movement was either denigrated or dismissed in the mainstream media -- if it was mentioned at all. Most magazines for women were limited to advice about saving marriages, raising babies, or using the right cosmetics. Article: HerStory: 1971 – Presen... After nearly 17 years of losing money, Ms. suspended publication in November. But at the time, Gloria Steinem, one of the magazine's founders, convinced Dale W. Lang, chairman of Lang Communications, which publishes Ms., that there were enough hard-core readers willing to pay $40 a year to assure its survival. The revamped magazine, to be published six times a year, will contain 96 pages of articles and photographs – but no advertising. Article: THE MEDIA BUSINESS; Ms. M... Within eight days [of publication] all 300,000 copies had sold out nationwide, drawing 20,000 letters from readers–an amazing number, considering that magazines with four times that publication rate average only 4,000 letters per issue.

× Amazon Results In a joint statement released today in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a cutting-edge feminist research and action organization, and Marcia Ann Gillespie, President of Liberty Media for Women, LLC, announced that the Feminist Majority Foundation will be assuming ownership of Liberty Media for Women, the publisher of Ms. magazine. Article: Ms. Magazine and Feminist... Ms. was co-founded by Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin in 1971. The first cover of Ms., emblematic of the women’s movement of the time, was brave and bold. A giant figure of Wonder Woman strides across the landscape, while the caption proclaims, “Wonder Woman for President.” Article: How Feminism Became the F... Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality.

She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. Article: Who Is Gloria? Some radical feminists felt Ms. was “watering down” their ideas for mainstream readers. But the magazine did break new ground, says Pogrebin. One issue dealt with domestic violence. It had a woman with a black eye on its cover. Ms. is [also] credited with being among the first to bring the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace to widespread attention. Article: Ms. Magazine Celebrates 4... Steinem and Carbine's attempt to create a "new kind of women's magazine" organization also paralleled the editors' attempt to develop a reader-centered text. Carbine...envisioned an organization structured as a circle, the magazine at the center, with everyone involved having equal access to that magazine. Readers of Ms. quickly established themselves as part of that circular organization.

× Amazon Results By age 29, Gloria Steinem had forged a reputation as a smart, pithy writer...Radicalized by an abortion speak-out, which she covered for New York in 1969, Steinem started spending more time thinking, writing, and giving talks about feminism. She testified in the Senate in 1970 on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, and co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. That same year, she helped launch Ms. magazine,which became the first periodical ever to be created, owned, and operated entirely by women. Article: How Do You Spell Ms. About — Gloria Steinem Her books include the bestsellers My Life on the Road , Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem , Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions , Moving Beyond Words , and Marilyn: Norma Jean , on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and in India, As If Women Matter . Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin's The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History. Ms.

Steinem helped to found the Women's Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children's education, and the National Women's Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She also co-founded the Women's Media Center in 2004. She was president and co-founder of Voters for Choice, a pro-choice political action committee for twenty-five years, then with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund when it merged with VFC for the 2004 elections. She was also co-founder and serves on the board of Choice USA (now URGE ), a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and works to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. She is the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries.

She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. She is currently working with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on documenting the grassroots origins of the U.S. women's movement, and on a Center for Organizers in tribute to Wilma Mankiller, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. As links to other countries, she helped found Equality Now, Donor Direct Action and Direct Impact Africa. As a writer, Ms. Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women's Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, the James Weldon Johnson Award for Journalism, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism and the 2015 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. Ms.

Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism. She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for her work in promoting girls' self-esteem, and Biography magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential women in America. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. In 2014, she received The Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award and in 2013, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. Rutgers University is now creating the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.

In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories." With Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, "Better Off Dead," which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty. She is also host and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated VICE series, WOMAN . Gloria has been the subject of three television documentaries, including HBO’s Gloria: In Her Own Words , and she is among the subjects of the 2013 PBS documentary MAKERS , a continuing project to record the women who made America. She was the subject of The Education of a Woman, a biography written by Carolyn Heilbrun. Gloria Steinem | Ms. Foundation for Women Ms. Foundation for Women Gloria Steinem Founding Mother In 1972, Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, remained one of its editors for fifteen years. She continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine’s move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation.

In 1973, Ms. Steinem joined with Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Marlo Thomas to create the Ms. Foundation for Women. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women’s magazines as well as for publications in other countries. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime, and been the subject of profiles on Lifetime and Showtime. Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem , Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions , Moving Beyond Words , and Marilyn: Norma Jean , on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and in India, As If Women Matter . Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History . Ms.

Steinem helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She also co-founded the Women’s Media Center in 2004. She was president and co-founder of Voters for Choice, a pro-choice political action committee for twenty-five years, then with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund when it merged with VFC for the 2004 elections. She was also co-founder and serves on the board of Choice USA (now URGE ), a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and works to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries.

She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. She is currently working with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on documenting the grassroots origins of the U.S. women’s movement, and on a Center for Organizers in tribute to Wilma Mankiller, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. As links to other countries, she helped found Equality Now, Donor Direct Action and Direct Impact Africa. As a writer, Ms. Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women’s Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, the James Weldon Johnson Award for Journalism, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism and the 2015 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. Ms.

Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism. She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for her work in promoting girls’ self-esteem, and Biography magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential women in America. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. In 2014, she received The Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award and in 2013, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. Rutgers University is now creating the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.

In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, “Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories.” With Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, “Better Off Dead,” which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty. Gloria has been the subject of three television documentaries, including HBO’s Gloria: In Her Own Words , and she is among the subjects of the 2013 PBS documentary MAKERS , a continuing project to record the women who made America. She was the subject of The Education of a Woman , a biography written by Carolyn Heilbrun. – from Gloria Steinem website, About Email Address Gloria Steinem : NPR Gloria Steinem Embed Embed Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 and remained one of its editors for 15 years.

Annie Leibovitz/Random House hide caption toggle caption Embed Embed At 81, Feminist Gloria Steinem Finds Herself Free Of The 'Demands Of Gender' : NPR At 81, Feminist Gloria Steinem Finds Herself Free Of The 'Demands Of Gender' Embed Embed At 81, Feminist Gloria Steinem Finds Herself Free Of The 'Demands Of Gender' At 81, Feminist Gloria Steinem Finds Herself Free Of The 'Demands Of Gender' Embed Embed Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 and remained one of its editors for 15 years. Annie Leibovitz/Random House hide caption toggle caption Annie Leibovitz/Random House Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 and remained one of its editors for 15 years. Annie Leibovitz/Random House Gloria Steinem is 81 — a fact that the iconic women's movement leader describes as "quite bizarre." "Eighty-one is an age that I think is someone else's age," Steinem tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

"I stop people on the street and tell them how old I am, because I'm trying to make myself believe it." But Steinem isn't unhappy about aging. The co-founder of Ms. magazine says that as she approached 60, she felt like she entered a new phase in life, free of the "demands of gender" that she faced from adolescence onward. Related NPR Stories 'Gloria: In Her Own Words': An Activist On Great Battles And Audrey Hepburn "Remember when you were 9 or 10 and you were this independent little girl climbing trees and saying, 'I know what I want, I know what I think'?" she says. "That was before gender descended for most of us." "Ironically, I found by 60 you're free again. So you're the same person you were at 9 or 10, only now you have your own apartment, you can reach the light switch, you hopefully have a little money. So you can do what you want," Steinem explains. For Steinem, doing what she wants means continuing to speak out about the political, social and economic barriers to women's rights.

She cites violence against women and the fight for reproductive rights as two of the most important issues facing women today. In her new memoir, My Life on the Road, Steinem looks back on her unconventional childhood, her decades-long career and her efforts to create a home for herself after spending much of her life on the road. Article continues after sponsorship Independent Booksellers I had been doing all of the foolish things that we then did [to terminate a pregnancy], like riding horseback, throwing ourselves down stairs. ... I am the most cowardly person you can imagine, physically speaking, but I did [throw myself down stairs]. ... I was desperate. I really was desperate. I just knew that if I went home and married, which I would've had to do, it would be to the wrong person; it would be to a life that wasn't mine, that wasn't mine at all. On what made her decide to start talking about her abortion The amazing thing was that it took me so long. There was no women's movement. It was supposed to be a secret. Women didn't share in the same way.

So it wasn't until many years later, after New York magazine had started, and I had gone to cover an abortion speak-out held in a church downtown in New York City and suddenly I heard other women standing up and talking about what it was like to have to go out and seek an illegal abortion. This was actually an alternate hearing to one that the New York State Legislature was holding on the liberalization of abortion law in New York state. This was before the Supreme Court ruling, and a group of early feminists had just said, "Wait a minute, in the Legislature they asked 14 men and one nun to testify" — you can't make this up — "let's hear from women who have actually had this experience." So I sat there as a reporter for New York magazine, listening to women tell their stories that were tragic and ludicrous and every human emotion all wrapped into one, and suddenly I thought, "Wait a minute, I had an abortion." And actually 1 in 3 American women had needed an abortion at some time in her life, so why is this illegal and why is it dangerous? And it's the kind of revelation that comes from people just telling the truth and discovering you're not alone.

On the morality of abortion It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in. Gloria Steinem It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in. I think we need a legal principle called something like "bodily integrity" which recognizes that though the state may jail us, they can't insist on injections or tests or pressuring us for organ transplants. Our skin needs to be the line of defense between our own dignity and will and any outside force. ... The definition of patriarchy is to be able to control reproduction, and that means you have to control women's bodies. On the most pressing issues for women today The most important issues are those to the women who are listening. I mean, it's not about dictating to each other what's important, but supporting each other in solving the ones that are in our daily lives. ... If you add up, in terms of the numbers of people, I would say that competing for No.

1 would be violence against females worldwide. If you add up all the forms of violence, whether it's domestic violence in this country, which is at an enormously high rate — I mean, the most dangerous place for a woman in this country is her own home, and she's most likely to be beaten or killed by a man she knows — or it is FGM, female genital mutilation, or it is female infanticide, or honor killings or child marriage. ... But tied for first place is the ability of women to decide when and whether to have children, because that is a major cause of death, the lack of that ability. ... And it is also a major cause of inability to be educated or to be free outside the home or to be healthy. I would say those two concerns — sexualized violence against women and reproductive freedom or reproductive justice — are right up there in our focus in every country. On creating a home for herself after many years on the road I had buried in my head this idea that you only made a home for [a] husband and children. I didn't see a lot of women making a permanent home for themselves; I didn't think that way.

And also, I was on the road, so I was always living out of suitcases and cardboard boxes when I was at home, and even though I now, to this day, live in the same apartment that I did then, it was more like a storage place than an apartment. It was only after I was 50 that ... I began to make a home — a nest — for myself. And I take such pleasure in it. I think in general, as a culture, we tend to think there are two choices: settling down or traveling. And actually you need both. ... Birds need a nest and they still fly. It took me a while [to understand] that it wasn't either/or — it was both. <em>Ms.</em> Magazine Co-Founder Mary Thom Killed in Motorcycle Crash Motorcycles Mary Thom, feminist and former editor of Ms. magazine, died in a motorcycle crash in Yonkers on Friday. Thom was riding her Honda motorcycle on the Saw Mill Parkway at around 4:20 p.m., when she was fatally struck by another vehicle. Thom spent her life championing women; in addition to serving as the editor of Ms.

magazine for 20 years, Thom is also the author of several books, and most recently served as editor of the Women's Media Center's features department. "She had a gift for helping people tell their own story, not for helping them sound like others, but helping them find their own voice," Gloria Steinem, who co-founded Ms., told reporters . One of Thom's greatest pleasures was riding her motorcycle , family members said. According to her nephew, she never owned a car and delighted in leading family trips to New Mexico and Glacier National Park. Thom was apparently in Yonkers taking her 1996 Honda Magna 750 out of winter storage when the crash occurred. According to reports, she veered into traffic on the Saw Mill Parkway, struck one vehicle and was struck by another. Her sister told reporters that Thom had been preparing to fly to New Mexico to retrieve another motorcycle for a family trip.

Question: Which Gloria co-founded Ms magazine?
Answer: Steinem