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INTRODUCTION
In January 1972, the first U.S. feminist, mass-circulation magazine for women--Ms.--sold out across the country in only eight days. The commercial Ms. lasted for 18 years, publishing cover stories on sexual harassment, wife abuse, and body image, printing columns by Alice Walker and Adrienne Rich, and including in each issue a lively and often contentious collection of letters by readers. In 1989, Ms. finally ceased publication, caused not by reader disinterest (circulation maintained itself at around 350,000 or more throughout the history of the magazine), but by advertisers' increasing refusal to buy space in a magazine they perceived as "political" (Farrell, 1991; Steinem, 1990).
Ms. magazine was a significant social experiment both within the context of the publishing industry and within the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Most obviously, Ms. attempted to popularize and disseminate feminist ideas to a mass audience. Indeed, scholars in sociology, media studies, and American studies have begun to analyze Ms. in some detail, as past of a large body of feminist periodicals in the 1970s and 1980s that sought to transform women's political and social perspectives. This scholarship has focused primarily on content analysis, looking at articles, editorials and advertisements as vehicles through which a new feminist consciousness was (or was not) articulated (Farrell, 1991; Phillips, 1978; Steiner, 1989). What has been less highlighted in this scholarship, however, is the fact that the founders of Ms. created a social experiment on a number of other fronts as well. Describing the magazine as an "open forum for all women," the founders of Ms. promised to create a magazine that bridged the world of the women's movement and the world of commercial publication. Indeed, Ms. was a unique commercial/political hybrid, attempting to harness the capitalist publishing industry for the women's movement. The founders hoped that the new magazine could prove to the publishers on Madison Avenue that a woman-controlled, women's movement magazine could be a financial success, and could prove to activists in the women's movement that a successful magazine could also be a feminist magazine (Ms., January 1973, p. 114).
This paper is a strategically chosen case study of yet another aspect of Ms. magazine as a social experiment, one that has largely been ignored in the literature...