25 Reasons We Love Gloria Steinem on Her 80th Birthday

I attended a fancy dinner party at the Waldorf – Astoria with some friends many years ago honoring, Madeline Albright, Joy Behar and Gloria Steinem. It was a really amazing evening to hear these three fucking cool women speak. During a break, my friend Courtney and I went up to Gloria and gave her an “official” life time membership card to the FCW Society! She really inspires so many of us and we are very grateful! Here’s a great blog post from Ms Magazine!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GLORIA!!

March 25, 2014 by Lindsey O’Brien and Andrea Ananighian

 1. She co-founded Ms. magazine!!!

2. She said, “A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
3. She used her skill has a journalist to explain and fight for women’s rights.
4. She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny not to write a sexy story but to expose harsh, exploitative working conditions.
5. She said of her own choice to have an abortion, “No matter how hard I tried to feel guilty … I couldn’t.”
6. She insisted on sharing her speaking engagements with women of color.
7. She has always embraced each younger generation’s feminist movement.

 

8. She has long advocated for affordable and available childcare in the U.S.
9. She said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
10. She can still tap dance, and when she was young she dreamed of becoming a Rockette.
11. She wrote the much-reprinted article, “If Men Could Menstruate.”
12. She said, “Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do … women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”
13. She said of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, “Catwoman is a feminist superhero with a story line and transformation of her own—plus class consciousness, a girl buddy, equal skills with the Batman equipment and an apartment of her own in Old Town.”
14. She protested the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
15. “She helped change the way the world the world thinks about women, and changed the way women think of themselves”—Marie Leonard (via Twitter)
16. She cofounded the Women’s Media Center
17. She helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus
18. Every Passover, she takes part in a women’s seder with her friends in New York City.
19. She said, “A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
20. She also said, “Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”
21. She wrote about female genital mutilation in 1980, long before it became commonly recognized.
22. She weighed in on Miley Cyrus and gave us all a lesson.
23. She makes her points with “good humor and verve,” which “may not be political qualities, per se, but they sure help change hearts and minds.”—Patricia Stokes, women and gender studies professor, Ohio University (via Twitter)
24. She has said, “I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much—and I’m using it to light the torches of others.”
25. She has yet to retire from the feminist fight. And she never will.

Written by:
Andrea Ananighian is a graduate in English from California State University, Channel Islands. She is currently an intern at Ms.

Lindsey O’Brien is currently studying journalism at Ohio University and interning at Ms.

MS Magazine — for FCW everywhere!

There are a few great magazines out there for Feminists and they all started because of MS Magazine!!

You can get a membership & subscription to MS for $25/year!
http://store.msmagazine.com/msmembershipsandrenewals.aspx

It doesn’t cost a lot to be a FEMINIST SUPPORTER!

MS. Founded in 1972, Ms. became the first national publication to advance women’s rights. For 28 years and counting, it’s championed the struggle for women’s equality and celebrated women’s new freedom. WOMEN’S STUDIES SYLLABUS The late 1960s marked the first time that colleges offered women’s studies as an academic subject, underscoring the fact that history books traditionally excluded women’s ideas, contributions, and experiences. ACT (TITLE VII) Women’s rights were not considered civil rights in the U.S. until women successfully lobbied to include a provision against sexual discrimination in the Civil Rights of 1964.

HerStory: 1971 — Present

When Ms. was launched as a “one-shot” sample insert in New York Magazine in December 1971, few realized it would become the landmark institution in both women’s rights and American journalism that it is today.

The founders of Ms., many of whom are now household names, helped to shape contemporary feminism. According to founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Ms.’ authors translated “a movement into a magazine.”

Ms. was a brazen act of independence in the 1970s. At the time, the fledgling feminist movement was either denigrated or dismissed in the mainstream media — if it was mentioned at all. Most magazines for women were limited to advice about saving marriages, raising babies, or using the right cosmetics.

When the Ms. preview debuted-carrying articles on subjects such as the housewife’s moment of truth, “de-sexing” the English language, and abortion, the syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick jeered that it was a “C-sharp on an un-tuned piano,” a note “of petulance, of bitchiness, or nervous fingernails screeching across a blackboard.”

And after the first regular issue hit the newsstands in July 1972, the network news anchor Harry Reasoner challenged, “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say.”

But Ms. struck a chord with women. Its 300,000 “one-shot” test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. It generated an astonishing 26,000 subscription orders and over 20,000 reader letters within weeks. By the time Ms. celebrated its 15th anniversary in 1987, Reasoner, media soothsayers, and the nation had all been pressed to change their tune.

Ms. was the first U.S. magazine to feature prominent American women demanding the repeal of laws that criminalized abortion, the first to explain and advocate for the ERA, to rate presidential candidates on women’s issues, to put domestic violence and sexual harassment on the cover of a women’s magazine, to feature feminist protest of pornography, to commission and feature a national study on date rape, and to blow the whistle on the undue influence of advertising on magazine journalism.

Ms. was the first national magazine to make feminist voices audible, feminist journalism tenable, and a feminist worldview available to the public.

Today, the magazine remains an interactive enterprise in which an unusually diverse readership is simultaneously engaged with each other and the world. The modern Ms. boasts the most extensive coverage of international women’s issues of any magazine available in the United States.

And the magazine’s time-honored traditions-an emphasis on in-depth investigative reporting and feminist political analysis, the Ms. Women of the Year Awards, and the renowned “No Comment” section-have been supplemented with discussion of such subjects as environmental feminism, women’s work styles, and the politics of emerging technologies, bringing a new generation of writers and readers together to create the feminism of the future.

Unique, outspoken, and hard-hitting, Ms. has consistently faced down financial instability and advertiser resistance. From 1978 to 1987, Ms. was published as a nonprofit magazine through the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication. In the ensuing decade and a half, Ms. had four different owners and adopted a revolutionary and extremely popular advertising-free model.

TO READ MORE – visit: http://www.msmagazine.com/

Gloria was given her FCW Society membership card … and all of the women who have ever worked with MS Magazine are all LIFETIME MEMBERS!! If they need their cards, all they need to do is email, trickydame@gmail.com