A couple of days ago, I sorted through my last box of autographed baseballs, and I found another artifact I’d forgotten about. Behind the printer and a 1962 “Life” magazine with a Roger Maris – Mickey Mantle Post cereal baseball card insert, I found my first edition of “Ms.” magazine.
The cover with the headline “Wonder Woman for President” threw me back to 1972.
Here’s another case of uncanny timing. The night before, a neighbor asked if I’d set up a projector in my Silver Sage Village community courtyard to screen “9 to 5,” the 1980 comedy starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and the late Dolly Parton.
Three women fed up with a sexist boss turn the tables, take control of the company, and change the workplace. It’s slapstick funny and a pretty good primer on workplace misogyny.
Then I read in my Yahoo! news feed that Gloria Steinem had died at 92.
Steinem and others founded “Ms.” The magazine in my collection seemed a lot more significant than it had the day before. I read the table of contents and flipped through the pages. The country had changed, but much of it hasn’t.
The first regular issue of “Ms.” appeared in July 1972. It began as a preview inserted into “New York” magazine in December 1971. That preview sold 300,000 copies, generating thousands of subscription orders and letters. The response showed that the world had seriously underestimated what women wanted to read about.
The women’s magazines of the day largely revolved around fashion, beauty, marriage, children, and how to keep everybody else happy. “Ms.” treated women as citizens and political actors, not just consumers.
Steinem stood at the center of it.
She wore several hats in the startup. She had to be a businesswoman, a strong writer, a savvy political activist, and one of second-wave feminism’s most recognizable figures.
Steinem believed that the feminist movement needed a national publication where women’s experiences and political ideas could be taken seriously.
She and the magazine editors wanted Wonder Woman on the first cover as a symbol of female strength and independence.
At the time, DC Comics had stripped Wonder Woman of her superpowers and put her into a more conventional secret-agent role. DC restored Wonder Woman’s powers and traditional identity.
“Ms.” chose Wonder Woman to make a point about what happens when a powerful woman is made less powerful.
Inside the first issue, Steinem wrote an article with the provocative title “Women Voters Can’t Be Trusted.” Steinem took on the conventional political wisdom that women were unreliable, politically passive, or voted the way the men in their lives told them to vote.
In the article, Steinem argues that society misunderstood and underestimated women voters. She encourages women to discover their political power.
The political world looked very different in the 1970s when only 15 women served in Congress. No woman had been a major-party presidential or vice-presidential nominee. Democrat Shirley Chisholm changed all that when the Congresswoman became the first African American woman to run for president.
I learned that “Ms.” named Dolly Parton one of its “Women of the Year” in 1987. Steinem praised Parton for infusing feminism into her music and for celebrating women who made their own way. You can hear that spirit in “Just Because I’m a Woman,” “9 to 5,” and “Travelin’ Man,” the theme for “Transamerica.”
Parton gave voice to women’s independence, working lives, and the double standards they faced. Steinem observed that Dolly didn’t give political speeches but walked the talk through her song lyrics.
My copy of “Ms.” had survived, tucked away among baseball memorabilia.
That’s appropriate.
Baseball is all statistics, records, and arguments by armchair coaches about who belongs in the lineup. In 1972, women had no records to compare and had to battle to get through the turnstiles.
Gloria Steinem spent her life arguing that women belonged in the seats and in the field, diving for hard-hit line drives.
Dolly, Gloria, and Wonder Woman for MVP!
The three men in Hillary’s life right now will be nothing but trouble until she can get them in line. I, like Noam Chomsky and Robert Reich, am Feeling the Bern until I can no longer.
It’s gonna be uglier than any campaign I’ve seen before, which isn’t saying much since none of them have been this gossipy and personal.
Dukakis didn’t respond to attacks about being 
“You’re right, I agree with you about figuring out how to keep money out of politics and I’ve been a little to complacent on that and it’s going to be a little uncomfortable for me to deal with the big banks and Wall Street after the PAC that’s been supporting me has accepted all that money. I didn’t think it was that big a deal, but apparently it is.
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