Mid-Revolutionary Mores

IN THE GLOSSY world of monthly, national circulation magazines--the ones that cost at least a dollar--there are two types; magazines for people, and magazines for women. Magazines for people have articles in them on the disbandment of HUAC, or the latest dealings of OPEC. Magazines for women have articles on breast cancer, child care, or "when to blow the whistle on the boss." In fact, one magazine this month has everyone of those articles. It even has the requisite beaming cherub on the cover, Yet there's a twist; this grinning infant is perched on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The magazine in question is Ms.

Ms. burst onto the scene three years ago with the help of a lot of money from Kay Graham of The Washington Post, and an editorial staff garnered from New York Magazine. Its first issue's cover girl was Wonder Woman, and she embodied the rising hopes for the new venture. Contrary to the usual pattern of American business, however, a dozen imitation "feminist" magazines have not sprung up in its wake. So Ms. is left being the sole mass-media spokeswoman for the woman's movement--a difficult position, to say the least. As Wonder Woman's face fades, Ms. settles into the fairly dull month-by-month job of putting together a magazine. And the question of just how representative or even useful Ms. is for most of the women in this country gets asked more and more often.

This month's issue makes the answer very clear. The communally run Ms. editorial staff must finally have decided just who its target-group should be. If the ad of the skinny young woman in her Danskin leotard and silk skirt that also recently ran in the New Yorker doesn't give it away, the articles on how to buy a sewing machine, or on Buffy Sainte-Marie, or the photographs of Andre Malraux and Jean Cocteau will. This magazine is for the wealthy, skinny, urban woman who probably has a job as well as a husband and household, but also has enough money and freedom of choice to appreciate articles on "How to choose the right child-care program." Of course, Ms. has been building up to this image for a long time. October's issue discussed the crucial question of whether it is possible to be a feminist and still love the Rolling Stones.

THERE ARE SAVING graces to Ms. It does credit its readership with having brains. A section in each issue ("Gazette") printed on newsprint rather than glossy paper, deals with issues of legislative and judicial reform as they relate to women all over the country. This month "Gazette" reports on an emergency shelter for the families of alcoholics in Los Angeles, the fight of a woman in Ohio to be the manager of a Union 76 gas station.

But the rest of the magazine, with its ads for Helena Rubenstein face masks and articles on abstract expressionist painters, serves only to reinforce, the misconception that the women's movement is only for the well-off and well-educated. The women Ms. directs its articles at need its help a lot less than other women in this country. The women Ms. attracts can also be seen reading Susan Sontag's battle on feminism with Adrienne Rich in the current New York Review of Books, Young women, fat women, poor women, ugly women and old women have no place to go--except back to Seventeen, Good Housekeeping and Modern Screen.

The basic problem is, of course, that there are 100-million women in this country, and one magazine cannot possibly meet the needs of them all. It's unfortunate that Ms. has had to become the most well-known, commercialized mouthpiece of the women's movement, for it ignores the lives so many women lead. The only national magazine that reassures women that they have brains ignores the fact that they might also have dishpan hands.