The Brooklyn Rail

As Ms. magazine celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, Suzanne Braun Levine, the magazine’s first editor (1972–1988), shares her experiences in light of today’s headlines. While at Ms., Levine developed and produced the documentary She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the 20th Century, which won a Peabody Award. Levine went on to become the first woman to edit the Columbia Journalism Review. She is also the author of four books about women over fifty, including Inventing the Rest of our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood, and co-author (with Mary Thom) of an oral history of Bella Abzug.

Frank Pizzoli (Rail): Fifty Years of Ms., an anthology of articles that appeared in the magazine since 1972, was curated by the magazine’s current editors with an introduction by Katherine Spillar and Eleanor Smeal and foreword by Gloria Steinem. The book is dedicated to the millions of women and men “who have marched and mobilized, been arrested and imprisoned, and spoken out at great personal cost in support of the simple belief that women and girls have fundamental human rights to equality, self-determination, autonomy, and dignity.” The note closes saying, “Our work together has only just begun. Here’s to the next fifty years.” How do you think the dedication tracks with our current political atmosphere?

Suzanne Braun Levine: We are in a period of backlash on most feminist fronts. But there are three generations after mine, full of energy and know-how, and I have faith in them to continue the work. Unfortunately, there’s also work to be redone. When the Roe v. Wade decision came down (January 22, 1973), we were working on one of the early issues, and celebrated the win in its pages. We headlined the article “Never Again” and included a photo of a woman lying on the floor of a bleak motel room, dead from a back-alley illegal abortion. It’s ironic that as we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, we have lost the life-changing right we had won half a century earlier. On the day Roe’s reversal was announced, I think a lot of us felt—I certainly did—as disheartened as we did on the day we learned Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to be our first woman president. 

Rail: What a contrast from then to now. In 2012 you reminisced in Huffington Post about your early days.

Levine: We have to look at our history, though, and acknowledge how much our world has changed. I am a good example of someone who was liberated by the women’s movement. The outfit I wore on my first day at Ms. in 1972 says it all: a matching pink silk blouse and pencil skirt—and a girdle! Stylish, but inhibiting. My ability to make my own choices was limited. For example, I had just gotten married and was, therefore, not able to get a bank loan or credit card without my husband’s signature. I had given up playing basketball (half-court for girls) after high school, because my college didn’t have any women’s teams. And I had gone through the nightmare of finding and undergoing an illegal abortion.

Rail: In 1981 you made a documentary, She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the 20th Century, which celebrated the progress women had made since winning the vote. Looking back, do you have any thoughts?

Levine: Whenever I show it, I am struck by how triumphant the ending is. It’s an exuberant women’s march, with the iconic Helen Reddy song playing in the background—“I am woman, hear me roar / In numbers too big to ignore.” Looking back, it was probably naive to think that revolution would march ahead like those exuberant women.

Rail: In movement circles, people will say these two things. First, that each generation has its own battles to wage. Second, every generation is standing on the shoulders of those who created change before them.

Levine: I worry that so much has been forgotten about where we started. What we’ve achieved. And that we keep reinventing the wheel. I think one of the problems with our culture is that we don’t pay attention to our history. I have a daughter who is thirty-seven, and the whole notion of abortion ever being illegal or needing her husband’s permission to function as an adult wasn’t in her consciousness. Now it is, because our achievements are threatened, but I’m afraid it is a problem with all social justice movements. We get so busy fighting for more, that those rights we have already achieved feel like they have always been there.

Rail: Which brings me to this. Last year, the magazine published an article “Abortion is Essential to Democracy.” How so?

Levine: Basically, none of the rights we have won will be assured until they are guaranteed in the Constitution. That’s why passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is so important—to move beyond legislation that grant rights but could be later amended or withdrawn. Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood this and argued that, while pressing for action in the courts, our efforts should be on guaranteeing women’s rights in the Constitution.

The ERA simply states that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” After it was introduced in 1971, it moved along state after state, gathering momentum and looking like a sure thing. And then came the backlash from a right-wing movement led by a woman named Phyllis Schlafly, which stalled it until it missed the deadline for passage.

Rail: And by 2020, Virginia voted to adopt the ERA, making it the thirty-eighth state. A second backlash was then launched when in March of this year, Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi) introduced the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Resolution which says “Congress does not have the authority to deem the ERA as a ratified amendment to the Constitution” because the original deadline has passed and any attempt to extend that deadline is not legislatively valid. In other words, opponents want to start the process over entirely.

Levine: Yes, the ERA deadline was extended a couple of times. But these current debates on whether the extensions are valid have placed the measure in limbo which is where politicians love things to be. I am confident, though, that this is one battle that hasn’t been, but surely will be, won.

Rail: In 1972, Gloria Steinem wrote about what she called “the gender gap,” the difference between voting patterns of women and men. At the time it was assumed that women would vote the way their husband or father did. Still true?

Levine: As the recent election cycle proved, there is a women’s vote, and it can produce winners, because the issues we vote on are not the same as our fathers or husbands. It’s clear that the patriarchy is still here and thriving. Who are these guys in those state legislatures saying that maybe they’ll let women have abortions in the first hour that they conceive? It’s such a violation of a woman’s individual integrity.

Rail: One can never tell when watching their mouths move if they really believe the things they say about abortion—allowed in the first hour of conception or within six weeks, when most women don’t even know if they may be pregnant. Or are they just that cynical?

Levine: They are focused on power, but women today have so much more power and savvy than we had in the early days. There are now women—not just tokens—with influence in every corner of the culture, in politics, the arts, law, science. At this point, it is impossible to imagine that we can go back into oppressed obscurity. One of my favorite examples of integrating women into a closed society is how symphony orchestras have changed. Traditionally women were not recruited into major orchestras. The argument was that they didn’t have the stamina, or they didn’t have the skill. Then pressure from feminists persuaded some orchestras to see what would happen if auditions were conducted behind a curtain, so listeners didn’t know who was playing the instruments. Suddenly women appeared in symphonies. Nowadays, women comprise nearly half of the musicians in orchestras.

That was the idea of a “gender gap” Steinem wrote about—the finding that women generally favor Democratic issues more than men. That has certainly proved to be the case recently. If what we saw in the recent elections is true, the next presidential election is going to be decided by women’s response to the Supreme Court. Women know how to get organized. We know how to get our voters out. I think there’s going to be real focus on mobilizing the anger that’s out there.