From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

This week there are two TIME magazines, both of them on newsstands and in the mail to subscribers. One is the regular issue you're holding. The other is a special issue, "Women: The Road Ahead," devoted entirely to that subject. In our 67-year history, it marks just the seventh occasion on which we have produced an extra issue of this kind, one that revolves around a single topic and remains on newsstands for more than a month.

When executive editor Edward Jamieson proposed an entire magazine focused on women, no one agreed more quickly than senior editor Claudia Wallis, who with Jamieson edited the special issue. Just last December she wrote a TIME cover story on how far women have come. "Yet there was still so much more to say," Wallis explains. "In that story we looked at the history of the women's movement. This time we wanted to look to the future."

Some experts on workplace organization believe there is an identifiably female brand of management, one that relies more strongly than the male- dominated variety on open decision making and consensus building. (See the issue for a story on this phenomenon.) Some of our staff say this approach was in evidence on the special issue, a project in which women largely directed the research, story selection, layout design and photo editing. "There was a remarkable degree of teamwork," says reporter-researcher Katherine Mihok, who was chief of research for the issue. "People concentrated upon the issue as a whole, not just the portion they were working on personally."

Associate art director Irene Ramp gave the issue its own special look. Though it contains the customary World and Nation sections, the rest is organized around five chapters with descriptive headings such as Public Images, the Changing Family, and Self and Society. Perhaps the most striking design choice is the cover image, a painting of a woman by Philadelphia artist Susan Moore. Editor Wallis thinks the portrait suggests that the woman is peering at the reader from behind a door that is partly open. "What does she see as she surveys the vistas ahead of her?" asks Wallis. "That was the question we wanted this issue to answer."