Harare Review of Books

544 pages.

Expected publication date: Sept 19, 2023 (Knopf)

Non-fiction.

It would be impossible to overstate the impact of Ms. Magazine on the US and on the world. Fifty years of advancing the cause of women—of being loud, confrontational and controversial where necessary, of starting the right kind of fires. Ms. has dared to go anywhere and everywhere women are—from households to government—and this collection of snippets from fifty years of publishing is a celebration and a declaration that women matter.

Extracts from the magazine are presented in sections from each decade of publishing, with some context where needed. There is original writing from people like Alice Walker (movingly, on The Colour Purple), Joy Harjo (on becoming a mother and contending with US healthcare), and of course Gloria Steinem. There’s a great piece by Michele Wallace about Black women in rap (Queen Latifah and MC Lyte!), and their role in countering misogyny. There is much thoughtful writing in the early years about housework and ”women’s work”—all considered banal and “background” and not worth talking about before the women’s movement. The impact of that writing is made clear in feedback in readers’ letters—from women, children and men. A powerful essay from 1990 by Jane Caputti and Diana Russell on femicide analyses the terrible events of December 6, 1989 at the University of Montreal, and is heartbreakingly and shockingly still relevant today. Steinem writes about Ms.’s struggles to get advertising to support the magazine, and (the sexist reasons) why—including, very memorably, a lunch with Leonard Lauder.

This is all just in the first half of this amazing and incredible retrospective, and I cannot recommend this book enough. So much feminist thought and history is captured in these pages, and all of it still so very relevant today. What is between these covers is really the history of women in the last fifty years—not just in the US, but internationally—and the progress of human rights as related to half the world’s population (with women’s rights inevitably tied to children’s rights). This is also a grim reminder of just how far we have to go, how slowly change happens: civil rights as a continuing process, never quite finished.

Thank you to Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem for being such powerful voices for women. Thank you to all of the women who’ve been on the frontlines and in the background. Many thanks to Ms. for being such a force for change and for good. And thank you to NetGalley and to Knopf for access to this ARC.

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