The controversial 1972 "Women's Liberation issue of Wonder Woman

[ismnotwasm]

http://exp.lore.com/post/50671811551/the-controversial-1972-womens-liberation-issue


Article about 'letters to Ms.' And Mary Thorn

Yesterday, I attended the memorial for reconstructionist Mary Thom, whom we lost in a tragic motorcycle crash last month and who changed the voice of women’s rights as founding editor of groundbreaking feminist magazine Ms. In the early 1970s, just as women were emerging from the stifling grip of the Mad Men era and beginning to raise their voices against injustice at the workplace, Ms. came in as a beacon of what many of us have since come to take for granted, a brave promise of what life would be like in a gender-blind world.

Named after the form of address recommended in secretarial handbooks for when a woman’s marital status was unknown, subsequently subverted by women who wished to be recognized as individuals rather than defined by their relationship to a man, the magazine proclaimed in its inaugural half-column announcement that “Ms.” was meant “only to signify a female human being. It’s symbolic, and important. There’s a lot in a name.” Indeed, there was: From the outset, Ms. made no apologies for calling things by their true, hegemonically defiant names — in the Preview Issue, which appeared as an insert in New York magazine in the spring of 1972, Ms. launched “a campaign for honesty and freedom,” in which fifty-three women signed a statement declaring that they had had an abortion, which at the time was illegal in most states.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/07/letters-to-ms-mary-thom/

[sufrommich]

2. I loved reading the old "letters to Ms.", they remind

I started reading Ms. around 1975,I was 18. I got a subscription to it after that,I think I stopped reading Ms. in the early '80s,I remember that I thought it was getting boring.