The first issue of Ms magazine was published 50 years ago this month. The cover featured a pregnant Kali, Hindu goddess of death, time and change. Each of her eight hands holds an object that flagged up the average woman’s role as a domestic engineer and underpaid wage earner including a frying pan, a typewriter, a steering wheel and a broom. Half a century on, what’s changed?
To celebrate the anniversary, several Ms pioneers were brought together for a roundtable discussion by the New York Times, among them the feminist activist and writer Gloria Steinem, fellow co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin and contributors novelist Alice Walker (who briefly opted out of Ms because of the lack of diversity in its covers), Jane O’Reilly and Janet Dewart Bell. (Now quarterly, the first feminist national magazine has a print readership of more than 160,000 and millions of readers online: “Ms is more than a magazine. It’s a movement,” it still proclaims.)
