50 Years of Ms. The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution

A celebration of Ms.—the most startling, most audacious, most norm-breaking of the magazine's groundbreaking pieces on women, men, politics (sexual and otherwise), marriage, family, education, work, motherhood, and reproductive rights, as well as the best of the magazine’s fiction, poetry, and letters

For the past five decades Ms. has been the nation’s most influential source of feminist ideas, and it remains at the forefront of feminism today, affecting thought and culture with a younger-than-ever readership (ages 16-20!).
   Ms. was the first U.S. magazine to: 

• feature prominent American women demanding the repeal of laws that criminalized abortion

• explain and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment

• rate presidential candidates on women’s issues

• feature domestic violence and sexual harassment on its cover, long before either was widely understood or acknowledged

• commission and publish a national study on date rape

     Here is the best reporting, fiction, and advertising, decade by decade, as well as the best photographs and features that reveal and reflect the changes set in motion by Ms., along with the iconic covers that galvanized readers. 
     Here are essays, profiles, conversations with and features by: Alice Walker, Cynthia Enloe, Pauli Murray, Nancy Pelosi, bell hooks, Billie Jean King, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Alison Bechdel, Brittney Cooper, and Joy Harjo, as well as fiction and poetry by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, and Sharon Olds, among many others.

GLORIA STEINEM, writer, political activist, and feminist organizer, was a founder of New York and Ms. magazines.
 
KATHERINE SPILLAR is the Executive Editor of Ms. magazine and Executive Director of Feminist Majority Foundation. Spillar served four terms as President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization for Women.
 
ELEANOR SMEAL is the publisher of Ms. and president of Feminist Majority Foundation which she co-founded, and its sister organization, the Feminist Majority. Smeal has been at the forefront of almost every major women’s rights victory in the U.S.