For the Liberated Female

In an effort to advance the cause of Women's Liberation, the feminist movement has launched a host of publications ranging from radical underground broadsides (Off Our Backs) to slick monthlies (New Woman). Some of these new journals now appear only sporadically because of money troubles. The latest Lib effort previews this week as a 44 page supplement to the year end issue of New York magazine. It seems far more promising than its predecessors, principally because its editor is feminism's superstar, Gloria Steinem.

Titled Ms. after the movement's preferred form of female address (instead of Mrs. or Miss), the magazine will appear on its own in January with a special double issue and then lie dormant until late spring, when monthly publication is scheduled to start. Elizabeth Harris, 49, a former vice president of CRM, Inc. (Psychology Today, Intellectual Digest), will serve as publisher. Editor Steinem, 37, envisions Ms. as a nonsexist "how to" magazine "for the liberated female human being--not how to make jelly but how to seize control of your life."

Clubby Intensity. New York is giving a helping hand at the start primarily because Steinem and several of her writers are members of its own staff. Judging by the first issue, Ms. would seem to have a lot of New York's clubby, with intensity but not enough of its firecracker prose or provocative flair.

Inevitably, the supplement's graphics are those of New York itself, but Steinem & Co. are still in search of a style of their own for future issues. In "The Housewife's Moment of Truth," New York Contributing Editor Jane O'Reilly outlines a seven-point program of back stiffening for women who want their men to share more of the household chores, but concludes sadly that living up to it may well prove impossible. In a fit of Msogamy, Freelancer Susan Edmiston charges that the traditional marriage ceremony locks the woman into a subservient state; she advocates that formal contracts be signed before marriage that will spell out responsibilities for both husband and wife.

Gender Freedom. Ms. also contains a bristly, jargon-loaded attack on sexist child rearing by Author Letty Cottin Pogrebin (How to Make It in a Man's World). She roundly condemns "sex-stereotyped" toys, books, games and emotions (girls are "cuddled," boys "rough-housed") that reinforce "role rigidity" and inhibit "gender freedom." Pogrebin takes TV commercials particularly to task for imparting to children the dictum that ruggedness makes the man and prettiness the woman.

In the lead article, Editor Steinem rather solemnly defines what she considers to be the rationale for the Liberation movement. Women, writes Steinem, "share the dreams, capabilities and weaknesses of all human beings, but our occasional pregnancies and other visible differences have been used to mark us for an elaborate division of labor that may once have been practical, but has since become cruel and false. The division is continued for clear reason, consciously or not: the economic and social profit of men as a group."

After its special January issue, which will cost $1.50, Ms. will sell for a dollar a copy, and its publishers hope to achieve a circulation of 250,000. Ads will have to be presented in a manner that, says the prospectus, "respects women's judgment and intelligence." Steinem promises to "refuse ads that are insulting," and has already ruled out vaginal deodorant promotions because she considers them "physically harmful." But ads for bras, which the movement supposedly regards as symbolic shackles, will be accepted. Explains Steinem: "It is a physiological question of whether or not you are comfortable wearing one --not that you are somehow indecent if you don't."

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