Patricia Carbine, Founder and Publisher of Ms. Magazine, Speaks with VU English and GWS Students

Guest Post by Charlie Gill, English Major, '21

On March 10th, Villanova students and faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies and English Departments had the privilege to gather (virtually) for a talk with Patricia Carbine, a founder and publisher of Ms. Magazine. Ms. was the first publication directed to women that exploded the paradigm of women’s-magazine-as-extended-advertisement, speaking to woman as a social and political identity rather than a consumer demographic. Leaning in and opening the window of radical feminism in fashionable middle-class living rooms all over the nation, Ms. walked a fine line between representing the most marginalized voices of the movement and keeping their (often less-revolutionary-minded) advertisers placated. The result was a publication that became a driving force of, and inextricably linked to, the movement of second wave feminism.

Pat Carbine was already a journalism industry insider when she, Gloria Steinem and others conceived of Ms., having been Editorial Director of McCall’s magazine and serving as a leader of Look magazine for years. It was her experience that drove the creators of Ms. in the direction of the women’s magazine format; glossy and accessible, something that wouldn’t look amiss(a-ms.?) on the coffee table of any mainstream home but would deliver content that would expand the boundaries of womanhood and feminist thought. It wasn’t an easy sell, as she recalled to VU’s students, and those they solicited for financial support often wanted more control than she or Steinem were willing to give. She recalled one particular meeting wherein a man demanded 33% control of the magazine in exchange for his investment. They held firm that that was too much and refused, then found themselves borrowing cab money to get home from the meeting. “There we were asking for five dollars,” Carbine wryly recalled, “Having turned down a million.”

As she recounted the evolution of the magazine; its surprising initial success, the struggles of balancing the interests of the most peripheral and marginalized voices with keeping their magazine accessible to the white upper middle class readers their advertisers demanded, their intentional editing of advertising content to avoid the harmful, the patronizing, or the purely exploitive, and navigating an industry and a movement at the same time, Carbine seemed most sentimental and struck by her recollection of the engagement the magazine wrought. Recounting the volume and content of letters (enough to later publish as their own book!) they received from women who found themselves suddenly seen and heard by the magazine’s content, she seemed conscious of the way in which her job as a journalist and publisher had pivoted to an identity as a feminist and a figure in a broader social moment and context. Indeed, the project of the Ms. founders’s lives broadened as the scope of their magazine did. Carbine recalled how they had been involved in protesting and advocating and setting up long-distance races for women, eventually achieving the success of women being able to compete in marathons. She also noted the impact of the Wonder Woman cover, and the significance of Wonder Woman as a cultural figure for women in the age long before women superheroes were commonplace.

Carbine’s pivot from journalist-in-feminism to feminist-in-journalism seemed clear as she drew near the end of her talk - a pivot that is reflected in her role as a founding mother of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a foundation with the mission of “build[ing] collective power in the U.S. to advance equity and justice for all… …by investing in, and strengthening, the capacity of women-led movements to advance meaningful social, cultural and economic change in the lives of women,” (Ms. Foundation for Women Mission Statement, https://forwomen.org), the mission of the magazine having animated from the page and into being. She is also deeply conscious of the work left to be done, and clear-eyed about the enormity of the resistance that equality still faces. In answer to a question about the status of reproductive rights in the U.S., Carbine recalled the impact of the article in the Ms. preview issue in which women, including famous public figures, came forward about having received an abortion procedure. She stated that she is not complacent or under the misapprehension that Roe V Wade settled the question; “We are in for a red hot fight, and the way legislators around the country are approaching the voter suppression issue, we will see [the old struggle] duplicate itself. The fact that these state legislatures are tilting in the direction that they are, I think we are in for a very difficult fight to preserve our own right over our reproductive decisions.” Carbine is a long-time member of Catholics for Choice. The gravity of this issue was not lost and could not have been more timely: just a day earlier, a Texas state representative had filed HB 3326 in the House, which would prohibit abortion and introduce criminal liability on a level that could extend even to seeking the death penalty against women who underwent abortion procedures.

Despite this, though, Carbine is not without optimism for the future, pointing out that history favors progress. She stumped the audience with a smile, asking “Can you remember the name of anybody, anybody besides Phyllis Schlafly, who was carrying the anti-feminist flag?” She also happily read a press release from that very day, announcing the creation of the gender policy council by President Biden, a new council devoted to the issues of gender equity across the country and internationally. Finally, she graciously and pointedly extended the scope of her optimism to the students gathered with her, visibly emotional as she ended her lecture by exhorting us to continue the fight; “So you all who are taking your Gender and Women’s classes couldn’t be further out front - and I salute all of you, and I envy all of you, and the thing that I want to say last is I am counting on you. We’re not there yet. We have a long way to go. But if you are understanding yourselves at your age in a way that my generation didn’t fully, -and we had so much learning to do in order to be able to start taking action - a lot of hopes are riding with you. And I’m thrilled to have been with you today.”

Patricia Carbine (left) with Gloria Steinem (right)