Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism

By Amy Erdman Farrell

Book Overview

In the winter of 1972, the first issue of Ms. magazine hit the newsstands. For some activists in the women's movement, the birth of this new publication heralded feminism's coming of age; for others, it signaled the capitulation of the women's movement to crass commercialism. But whatever its critical reception, Ms. quickly gained national success, selling out its first issue in only eight days and becoming a popular icon of the women's movement almost immediately.
Amy Erdman Farrell traces the history of Ms. from its pathbreaking origins in 1972 to its final commercial issue in 1989. Drawing on interviews with former
editors, archival materials, and the text of Ms. itself, she #examines the #magazine's efforts to forge an oppositional politics within the context of commercial culture.
While its #status as a feminist ##and# mass media magazine gave Ms. the power to move in circles unavailable to smaller, more radical feminist periodicals, it also created competing and conflicting pressures, says Farrell. She examines the complicated decisions made by the Ms. staff as they negotiated the multiple -- frequently incompatible -- demands of advertisers, readers, and the various and changing constituencies of the feminist movement.
An engrossing and objective account, Yours in Sisterhood illuminates the significant yet difficult connections between commercial culture and social movements. It reveals a complex, often contradictory magazine that was a major force in the contemporary feminist movement.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807847356
• ISBN13: 9780807847350
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Elegant analysis of timely topic

This is a wonderful book providing a fresh perspective on the history of this all important magazine. Farrell lucidly analyzes the tensions that this publication faced as it became the most recognized publication to emerge out of the feminist movement in the United States over the past 30 years. She coins the term "popular feminism" in this book to describe what Ms. set out to accomplish. She uses this term seriously and addresses its implications with care, neither condemning the magazine or its publishers for seeking a mass audience, nor naively celebrating Ms. as a "true" mouthpiece of women everywhere. On the contrary, her text reveals the complexity of this idea: the difficult, and ultimately impossible, negotiations between commercial and social interests that the magazine attempted to negotiate, the possibilities created by a mass media periodical that addressed its audiences as political subjects, and the claim that readers made to make the magazine their own. Farrell's brilliant account of the history of Ms. comes at an important time as the publication has recently hit hard times. Some have argued that the magazine serves no useful purpose anymore, even that feminism is dead. After reading Farrell's book, it is clear to me that neither is true, and that both Ms. and feminism are involved in complex cultural dialogues and are continually evolving.