Enter Helen (32 page)

“
We were talking about women who wanted to make their own decisions and didn't necessarily believe that their fulfillment lay in the finding, wooing, and marrying of a man.”

—Pat Carbine, looking back on
Ms.

I
t started with a simple idea that was revolutionary at the time: What if there could be a magazine created, edited, and run by women? What if that magazine ran articles that covered women's real problems as opposed to the ones manufactured by advertisers to sell everything from hair dye to dishwashing detergent? And rejected ads that insulted women or turned them into caricatures of themselves? And represented women of all races and backgrounds? What if that magazine told the truth about women's lives?

Early in 1971, Gloria Steinem and a feminist lawyer named Brenda Feigen Fasteau brought together a group of female journalists to brainstorm ideas for such a magazine. Gloria and Brenda had a history of collaborating on feminist issues, ever since they met while working to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. In July 1971, along with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, they cofounded the National Women's Political Caucus, a group of feminists working to advance the
number of women in office at national and state levels—and to put women's issues on both major parties' platforms.

Around the same time, Gloria asked Letty to join some group discussions about starting a new publication back in New York.
Gloria had hosted two of three meetings in her living room. Along with dozens of writers, editors, and other activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono showed up to discuss the new magazine that didn't yet have a name. Almost everyone agreed that the movement needed a magazine, but what kind?

Gloria had been satisfied with a newsletter format, but Brenda envisioned a slick publication with newsstand appeal, an idea that Letty supported, though not everyone agreed. Radical feminists like Vivian Gornick and Ellen Willis wanted their magazine to look radically different from traditional women's magazines with their perfectly turned-out articles about marriage and motherhood.

Then there was the question of the name. What about “A Woman's Place”? “Lilith”? “Sisters”? “Sojourner”? “The First Sex”? “The Majority”? “Bimbo”?

After those initial meetings, the details began to take shape. In April, Gloria circulated a confidential memo: “Some notes on a new magazine . . .”
Every Woman
was the working title, and it aimed to speak to women who didn't find themselves accurately represented in the pages of magazines like
McCall's
,
Good Housekeeping
,
Ladies' Home Journal
, and
Cosmopolitan
. “
All are designed to tell the woman how to better run her household, her husband and her children—save for that unliberated woman's survival kit,
COSMOPOLITAN
, which tells her how to be sexy,” the proposal read. “In short, the existing women's magazines simply exalt woman as dependent sex object/wife/mother. . . . There is no magazine that addresses itself specifically to a new identification of American woman.”

The modern American woman was someone who realized that her own interests and actions were bound up with those of all women, regardless of race, class, creed, or color. She was part of a “We” that included college students, working women, women on welfare, and frustrated housewives marooned in the suburbs.

Though the magazine would include a range of viewpoints, it would target educated women with above-average incomes and sophisticated reading tastes running the gamut from
Harper's
to
Psychology Today
.
Assuming its readers were “intelligent and literate,” its editors would inform them on social and political issues directly affecting their lives, and feature content not typically seen in a women's magazine or any magazine.
Stories with headlines like:

With her background in public relations and political organizing, Elizabeth “Betty” Forsling Harris was listed as the publisher, but her commitment wouldn't last a year due to a variety of problems, not the least of which was a major personality conflict.
Notoriously difficult and prone to yelling, Betty threw tantrums—and objects—when she didn't get what she wanted. After the fallout with Harris, Pat Carbine came on as publisher, abandoning her brand-new post as editor of
McCall's
.
“My plan
was to get
Ms.
going with Gloria running it as editor, then to go back to
McCall's
,” Carbine says, “but then came the moment when it was clear we would have to do it together if it was going to happen.” Joining Carbine and Steinem were cofounders Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock.

Shortly after the proposal made its first rounds, “Battling” Bella Abzug, recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1971, agitated for a new piece of legislation. The Ms. Bill would prohibit
federal agencies from using prefixes that identified a woman in relation to a man. Women shouldn't have to check a box for “Miss” or “Mrs.” on a government form when men weren't required to reveal their marital status. The federal government should start recognizing women as individuals, “not as the wives of individuals,” Abzug told the House. The Austrians had adopted
Frau
and the French
madame
. Americans should adopt
Ms.

“H
ELLO
, I
'M CALLING
from
Ms.
magazine—”

“Where?”

“
Miizzz
. Em. Es—”

“What?”

It went on like that for a while. Every day, when the founders of
Ms.
magazine made an outgoing call, they got incoming confusion. But part of the beauty of
Ms.
was that it
had
to be explained—more than just a title, it symbolized a mind-set that, if adapted by enough people, could change the very infrastructure of American life. Outlining the magazine and its market potential to possible investors and advertisers proved trickier.
Carbine and Steinem borrowed friends from
Look
and
New York
to help train their rookie staff, who grappled with a very basic problem: How do you explain a product that doesn't exist yet?

They started with the basics:
Ms.
would be approximately eighty-eight pages, roughly the size of
Time
, and sold by subscriptions and on newsstands. Still, people wanted to hold something in their hands. They needed an image, so Carbine gave them one:
Cosmopolitan
. “Picture a spectrum of magazines—the Seven Sisters, fashion magazines, food magazines, etc.,” she said. “Along the spectrum of magazines not devoted to a single subject, like food or fashion, you could put
Cosmo
on one end of the continuum and
Ms.
would be directly on the other. We would be bookends.” Every advertiser knew That
Cosmopolitan
Girl. Well, the
Ms.
woman was her opposite in almost every way.

Cosmo
's articles were supposed to help girls get over their hang-ups, but its ads only reinforced them. “
Do you have The Globbies?” asked one ad for the Slimmers Glove System: Simply apply some gel onto their two-sided glove to massage and buff those upper-thigh bulges away! Vaginal odor? “
Relax,” read an ad for Cupid's Quiver—a liquid douche available in champagne and raspberry flavors, among other scents—“And enjoy the revolution.”

By 1970,
Cosmo
was full of ads for personal hygiene and beauty products, but Carbine and her team had bigger aspirations for
Ms
. “
We did not go for cosmetics
at all
,” she says. Instead, they went for cars, financial services, and alcoholic beverages. “I'm talking anything you could have found in
Newsweek
or
Time
,” she adds. “I believed that it was time for the advertising and marketing community to realize that women were worth as much as men. We were out there every day as agents of change. I viewed our advertising salespeople as educators.”

As Carbine saw it, she and her sales team had to do much more than convince companies like Chevrolet—which targeted only men—to advertise to women. They had to change the way those companies thought about women in the first place, not merely as
passengers, but as drivers, literally and figuratively. “Do you have a daughter?” Carbine's team asked more than a few executives. What was she planning to do after college? Might she need a car of her own someday?

“
I talked about the spirit that was animating women to want to explore and begin to realize their full potential—and to be able to make choices about their lives that included a job working at home as a mother, but also included the possibility of getting into med school or becoming a lawyer,” Carbine says. “I think
Cosmo
's basic message was, ‘Here's how you get a more-than-suitable husband.'”

Just in case the difference between
Ms
. and
Cosmo
still wasn't clear enough, the sales team sought to make it clearer through contrast, Carbine adds: “When push came to shove about comparing us to
Cosmo
, I do remember someone saying, ‘This is extreme—but if you want to think about
Cosmo
as the poison, think of us as the antidote.'”

“
I'm a materialist, and it's a materialistic world. Nobody is keeping a woman from doing everything she wants to do but herself.”

—Helen Gurley Brown in
Time
, 1968

W
orking as a kindergarten teacher in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Helen's cousin Lou wasn't aware that there was a magazine called
Ms.
in the works, but she knew that there were women out there who resented
Cosmo
's message and derided Helen for it. Lou never considered herself a
Cosmo
Girl, and she took the magazine's articles with a big grain of salt when she read them at all—but she also felt that the feminists were missing something important.
“Even back then, as such a young woman, I felt Helen did not get the credit she deserved for freeing women to pursue their dreams,” Lou says now. “She was a self-made person, then encouraged and reinvented by David. I think most women will agree she was a feminist regardless of what her critics thought.”

Yes, Helen dispensed copious advice on how to catch a man, but for every article in
Cosmo
like “Why (Sob) Didn't He Call and How (Aha!) to Make Him,” there was one like “Buying a Used Car Wisely.” Ever since Lou could remember, Helen had been ahead of her time when it came to giving women financial advice—she was obsessed with money, and she was also good with it.

Lou never stopped relying on Helen's advice, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-six, she found that she needed it more than ever. Her first husband had left her when she was six weeks pregnant, and Lou soon found herself a single mother, taking care of an infant in a freezing-cold trailer. She knew she needed to move for the sake of both of them, and she found a house that she wanted to buy. She had saved some money toward a down payment, but she would have to borrow the rest. Everyone told her that no bank would lend her the money—that banks didn't give those kinds of loans to single women—and she didn't want a cosigner. She wanted the house to be her own.

“
Enter Helen,” Lou says. “She told me, ‘Nonsense. You go and speak to the bankers, and I know you can convince them you will be a good client. You are great with money, so take a budget you have worked out and
convince
them.'”

Bolstered by Helen's advice, in the summer of 1972, Lou made an appointment at the largest bank in the small town of Stillwater. The loan officer was pleasant enough, though very skeptical. The bank had never loaned money to a single woman before, he explained, but Lou was determined to be the first. On his desk, she noticed a photograph of a little boy and asked if he would be entering kindergarten soon. Yes, the officer said, he would be starting in the fall—at Lou's school. “There was only one class, so I would be his teacher,” Lou says. “I asked the man if he would have wanted his little boy in a trailer that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Then I asked him if he was ready to take a chance on his son's teacher. Sure enough, I got the loan and was never late on the payment.

“
The point is, Helen believed in me,” Lou continues. “I felt empowered, and I know countless others did, too, although not from personal experience, but from Helen's writings. She didn't need
to tell me to look my best and be as charming as possible; I knew. For whatever reason, that line of thinking went out of favor with many women during the feminist movement. But I'll always remember that Helen was a believer in women.”

A
ROUND THE SAME
time that Lou got her bank loan, there were sightings of Helen Gurley Brown at consciousness-raising groups around New York.
Someone saw her at an organizer's house, an informal gathering of sisters. Enter Helen: She came in, made a point of taking off all of her jewelry, and sat down with the group. “Somebody who was there, a poet, thought it was remarkable that she came in and took off her earrings, sat down, and got comfortable,” says Susan Brownmiller, who heard about it secondhand. “Then, at the end of the meeting, she put her earrings and all her jewelry back on. They thought that was funny.

“
She was indicating that women
have
to put up this front, but that wasn't really who she was. But she was also telling the women's liberation women, ‘Get real.' The front of decking yourself out glamorously—‘You have to do this, grow up.'”

At least that's how the poet conveyed it to Brownmiller. “That's what affected her the most; that this woman came in in costume and wanted everybody to know, ‘This is reality, kiddos.'”