July 3, 2025
by Carla Hay
“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print”
Directed by Salima Koroma, Alice Gu and Cecilia Aldarondo
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” (which covers the 1970s and 1980s decades) features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans) in the media and entertainment industry discussing the impact of Ms. magazine, the first nationally distributed American devoted to feminism.
Culture Clash: Ms. magazine covered controversial topics such as domestic violence, sexual harassment and pornography while also dealing with its internal problems of racial inequality and disagreements about the magazine’s editorial direction.
Culture Audience: “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about feminism and visionary magazines.
“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is an illuminating chronicle of the first decade of feminist-oriented Ms. magazine. The documentary (which has interviews with the founding leaders and many of the original staffers) doesn’t sugarcoat the magazine’s problems and failings. Because the documentary only covers the history of Ms. in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s not a comprehensive story of the magazine, but it does give some fascinating history lessons on how Ms. magazine affected culture and vice versa.
“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The documentary includes excerpts from many letters sent by Ms. magazine readers in the 1970s and 1980s. “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is told in three parts, each helmed by a different director. Having each director for each of these three parts is both an asset by havng different director perspective and a flaw because the documentary’s production inconsistency. For example, in the last part of the documentary, the interviewees are not shown on camera.
Part One, titled “A Magazine for all Women” and directed by Salima Koroma, covers the origins and earliest years of Ms., beginning with the magazine’s launch in 1971 and the criticisms from people on both ends of the political spectrum. Part Two, titled “Ms.: A Portable Friend” and directed by Alice Gu, chronicles how Ms. became the first American women’s magazine to delve into problems such as domestic violence and sexual harassment. Part Three, titled “No Comment” directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, tells how Ms. was affect by feminists’ varied opinions on pornography and definitions of sexual exploitation.
Part One dutifully describes how Ms. magazine came to be, as told through interviews with Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem, Ms. founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Ms. founding publisher Pat Carbine, Ms. founding editor Suzanne Braun Levine, Ms. contributing writer Jane O’Reilly and Marcia Ann Gillespie, who became the first black woman to be the editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine. Steinem says she was inspired to start Ms. after covering a women’s rights movement meeting for New York magazine. “I suddenly realized that the women’s liberation” movement was being born.
The purpose of Ms. was to cover issues that other women’s magazines weren’t covering. At the time, women’s magazines were mostly about domestic responsibilities, fashion and/or beauty. Ms. wanted to challenge the status quo and celebrate that women should have options besides being wives and mothers.
Ms. magazine’s first issue, which was quickly put together in five months, was an insert in New York magazine’s December 1971 issue. The cover of Ms.’s first issue was an illustration by Miriam Wosk of a pregnant woman with several arms, inspired by Hindu goddess Kali, juggling various household and work items. Ms. became a stand-alone magazine with its January 1972 issue, which featured Wonder Woman on the cover. Ms. was an immediate success, selling out its first stand-alone issue. (Ms. began as a monthly magazine and switched to being as quarterly magazine since 1987.)
Some of the article titles in the Ms. magazine’s first few issues were “How to Make Your Own Marriage Contract” and “The Black Family and Feminism.” Steinem wrote an essay titled “Sisterhood.” The emphasis of Ms. wasn’t on how women could be better wives and mothers but how women could be better human beings whose worth was not dependent on whether or not a woman is a wife or mother.
O’Reilly’s “Click” essays is still cited as one of Ms.’s most memorable breakthrough articles. In the article, O’Reilly remembers seeing her family members walk over a pile of folded laundry that she had placed at the bottom of the stairs in the house. When her husband asked her why she didn’t put the laundry away, she had a “click” moment when it suddenly “clicked” with her to say what she felt: “Why don’t you carry it [the pile of laundry] up yourself?”
However, the magazine had its share of controversy and critics from the beginning. Harry Reasoner, who was a TV anchor for ABC News at the time, predicted on television that Ms. would be an embarrassing flop. He later made an on-air apology for being very wrong with this prediction. (Reasoner apparently had a pattern of being sexist toward women, since he reportedly treated Barbara Walters very badly when they worked together as co-anchors of “ABC Evening News.” The 2025 documentary “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” has more details.)
“A Magazine for All Women” is steeped in irony because Ms. magazine certainly doesn’t speak to all women. Many women are not believers in the feminist ideology that is the core of Ms. magazine. Similarly, the documentary acknowledges that in its earliest years, Ms. had many of the same problems with racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality that the feminist movement had overall: The self-appointed leaders were middle-class and affluent white women.
Cottin Pogrebin admits in the documentary that it was mistake that all of Ms.’s founding editors were white instead of having diverse leadership. Ms. made an attempt to remedy its racial equality problem by hiring former Essence editor-in-chief Gillespie as a contributing writer, but that didn’t happen until 1980. Gillespie rose through the ranks at Ms. by becoming a contributing editor, executive editor and editor-in-chief. Gillespie was editor-in-chief of Ms. from 1992 to 2001.
Essence magazine (a publication geared to black women) was launched in 1970, a year before the launch Ms., and the documentary acknowledges that in many ways, Essence helped paved the way for Ms. magazine because Essence covered civil rights and political issues at a time when most other women’s magazine were not. In the documentary, Gillespie admits that she was upset that Alice Walker’s 1974 “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” essay was published in Ms. instead of Essence, where Gillespie was editor-in-chief at the time. Gillespie says that Ms. got preference over Essence because Ms. was considered more “mainstream” (in other words, led by white people), so Ms. automatically got more media coverage.
Walker (who later found massive fame for writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel “The Color Purple”) was a contributing editor at Ms. from the late 1970s to 1986, and resigned from that position because she publicly stated that Ms. was not putting enough people of color on the cover of Ms. magazine. Walker is not interviewed in the documentary. However, feminist writer Michelle Wallace (who is also African American) gives credit to Walker for giving Wallace important coverage in Ms. magazine. Wallace notes that when she did a separate photo shoots with Ms. and Essence, the people at Ms. made Wallace remove her braids, while the people at Essence let her keep her braids exactly the way that Wallace wanted.
Even with these racial inequalities within the Ms. magazine staff, the magazine championed black women in some ways that other “mainstream” magazines would not. Ms. was the first “mainstream” magazine to put Democratic politician Shirley Chisholm on the cover (for the March 1972 issue of Ms.), knowing that several magazine stands in the U.S. South would refuse to carry this issue because of Chisholm was on the cover. Ms. also lost out on advertising revenue from companies that refused to do business with Ms. because of the magazine’s editorial coverage of civil rights and politics.
Part Two of the documentary is well-researched but is the most laudatory section of the documentary because it essentially gives constant praise to Ms. for being the first nationally distributed American women’s magazine to do cover stories on domestic violence (“Battered Wives,” August 1976 issue) and sexual harassment (“Sexual Harassment on the Job and How to Stop It,” November 1977 issue). Many of magazine’s sales staff nearly quit over the decision to show a battered woman’s face (he right eye was bruise) on the cover of the domestic violence issue. For the sexual harassment cover photo, a man’s hand is shown touching the inside of a female puppet’s blouse because many of the Ms. staffers thought it would be inappopriate to have a real woman pose for that type of photo. The magazine weathered these controversies and supported legislation to hold people accountable for these abuses and to give more protection to victims/survivors.
In the documentary, Steinem says feedback from readers was crucial in influencing many of the editorial decisions and to encourage the magazine to keep going during difficult times. “The letters [from readers] were a lifeline,” Steinem comments. “They let us know that we were needed.” Not all of the reader feedback was positive, of course. A recurring theme in Ms. magazine’s history is that people feel threatened or dislike what feminism is all about.
True feminism isn’t about bashing men. True feminism is about believing in gender equality in a society where men usually have most of the power. That’s why when Ms. did a Men’s Issue in 1975, it was a controversial decision. Cottin Pogrebin explains why Ms. had a Men’s Issue: “We were liberating men from a straightjacket as well.” She adds that this straightjacket was choosing work over family and suppressing emotions.
Alan Alda (the actor best known for starring in the TV series “M*A*S*H*”) is the only man interviewed for this documentary. Steinem describes Alda as a “pioneering male feminist.” In his documentary interview, Alda says he is still proud to call himself a feminist but he also remembers the sting of criticism that he got for being a male feminist: He was called “king of the wimps” for his progressive views on feminism.
In addition to political issues that could alienate some people, Ms. wasn’t afraid to tackle health and business issues that could alienate potential advertisers. In the documentary, Steinem comments: “Advertisers censured women’s magazines in ways that they didn’t with Time or Newsweek. We needed advertising, but we weren’t selling our souls to advertisers” As an example, Steinem names Clairol (a leading company for hair products) as a company that refused to advertise in Ms. because Ms. did an article on the dangerous chemicals found in hair dye.
Part Three of the documentary skillfully handles the messy controversies within feminism and at Ms. magazine over how to cover the topics of pornography and other sex work. Within the ranks of Ms. magazine, the decision was made to make the distinction between erotica and pornography. It ended up being a cover story titled “Erotica and Pornography: Do You Know the Difference?” for Ms.’s November 1978 issue. Essentially, the article said that erotica was about sexuality, while pornography was about power and using sex as a weapon.
But with these arguable and subjective parameters, people still disagreed on what was “offensive” when it comes to pornography and other sex work. Andrea Dworkin (who died in 2005, at the age of 58) was a feminist who firmly believed that all pornography was bad for women. Steinem describes Dworkin as being “like an Old Testament prophet, raging from the hills.” Cottin Pogrebin adds, “Andrea was like a hero for all of us.”
The documentary mentions the work that the activist group Women Against Pornography did to shut down adult entertainment businesses back in the 1980s. And it’s also mentioned that left-wing feminists who railed against pornography also had this anti-porn stance in common with the right-wing conservatives who also wanted to eradicate pornography. Carole S. Vance, an anthropologist interviewed in the documentary, says it’s a slippery slope to have legal punishment for porn made by consenting adults. Dworkin was a contributing writer for Ms. until 1985, when she cut ties with the magazine because she felt that Ms.’s editorial acceptance of some pornography was a betrayal of her feminist values.
Another group of people who felt betrayed by Ms. were porn actresses and other sex workers, who were excluded from being interviewed in Ms.’s November 1978 erotica/porn cover story and other public discussions of how porn was affecting women. Interviewed in the documentary are best friends Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera, who were porn actresses and sex workers in the 1970s and 1980s and later documented adult entertainment as journalists. Sprinkle, Vera, and Robin Leonardi (daughter of 1970s porn star Gloria Leonard) says that Ms. magazine should not have excluded the input and perspectives of sex workers from that article and other editorial coverage of similar subject matter.
Ellen Sweet, who was a senior editor and writer at Ms. Magazine from 1980 to 1988, comments in the documentary about Ms. magazine’s coverage of porn: “This was probably the hardest thing we had to do. There were feminists on both sides of the issue.” When Sweet hears about an unpublished letter to Ms. from former porn actress/director Candida Royalle lamenting about Ms. ignoring the perspectives of women who work in porn, Sweet says: “I’m very sorry she was excluded.”
Toward the end of the documentary, it’s briefly mentioned that Sprinkle finally got to be a contributing commentator in the pages of Ms. when she wrote an article for Ms. in 2000. Sprinkle’s Ms. article wasn’t about sex. It was about cookies. Other people interviewed in the documentary are Dr. Lisa Coleman, president of Adler University; Lindsy Van Gelder, former Ms. magazine staff writer; and feminist activist Robin Morgan, co-founded Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Steinem in 2005.
“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is an undoubtedly an inspiring historical documentary for people who believe in feminism. The movie doesn’t fully acknowledge that the trailblazing that Ms. magazine did was in the context of the 20th century, when magazines had much more influence in the media than magazines do now. Therefore, the documentary exists in somewhat of a time capsule bubble, with no mention of what Ms. is doing for feminism since the Internet has become a dominant force in the media. As it stands, “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is still worth watching for nostalgia and as an example of struggles in feminism that are still relevant today.
HBO premiered “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” on July 2, 2025.
