history

Ms. Magazine Turns 50

Photo: Ms. Magazine

Ms. Magazine was a brazen act of independence when it launched 50 years ago. First introduced to the world as an insert in New York MagazineMs. demonstrated the potential for journalism that centered news and analysis around women and their lives and made a feminist worldview more accessible to the public.

That potential quickly pivoted to power. How? Ms. didn’t just cover the news — it made the news. It reported on trends and helped to create them. Over the years, Ms. has sparked laws and judicial changes, influenced policy, generated new vocabulary, and forced action on issues too long ignored. Articles in Ms. have won awards, fueled movies and books, spurred scholarship, and are still widely reprinted and included in textbooks and collections.

Today, Ms. continues to publish its iconic print magazine, which is distributed quarterly via membership subscription, through newsstand and bookstore sales, at events and conferences nationwide, and via the Ms. Prisons and Domestic Violence Shelters donation program.

Its dynamic website publishes breaking news and expert commentary daily. Among the most popular and widely covered topics: protecting reproductive autonomy, ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, centering women’s rights in democracy, and highlighting dispatches from grassroots and global activists. Ms. has a social-media following of half a million and an active membership who receive daily and weekly newsletters.

Building on a rich legacy, Ms. began podcasting in 2020, and in 2022 launched Ms. Studios. Women of color–led, it is home to an array of multimedia programming, including popular podcasts On the Issues with Michele Goodwin and Fifteen Minutes of Feminism. Coming in January 2023: The Talk: A Podcast on Law, Society, and Politics and Book Club, a unique window on leading feminist authors as they discuss their books and writing processes and give behind-the-scenes views of their works. Ms.’s newest platform, Women & Democracy, provides in-depth analysis on a wide array of issues impacting full and fair representation.

Ms. Classroom brings the magazine into college curricula. Academic scholars and researchers play a central role in Ms.’s mission: From the sciences to law, politics, and the humanities, Ms. trainings and writing workshops cultivate and ensure strong and reliable feminist perspectives in mainstream news media.

Later this year, 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf, Fall 2023) will hit bookstores. A one-of-a-kind collection of the magazine’s most startling, audacious, and norm-breaking pieces — on women, men, politics (sexual and otherwise), marriage, family, education, work, motherhood, reproductive rights — it is filled with iconic art, covers, and photos, along with a foreword from Gloria Steinem and pieces by or about bell hooks, Alice Walker, Pauli Murray, Nancy Pelosi, Billie Jean King, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Allison Bechdel, Brittney Cooper and Joy Harjo, among many others.

Over half a century, Ms. has helped to shape contemporary feminism, with its editors and authors translating a movement into a magazine. Through powerful storytelling and trustworthy reporting, Ms. continues to inform, encourage, and enlighten the next generation.

“50 Years of Truth-Telling and Rebelling,” by the editors of Ms.

Ms. Magazine Turns 50