Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism

This is a wonderful book providing a fresh perspective on the history of this all important magazine. Farrell lucidly analyzes the tensions that this publication faced as it became the most recognized publication to emerge out of the feminist movement in the United States over the past 30 years. She coins the term "popular feminism" in this book to describe what Ms. set out to accomplish. She uses this term seriously and addresses its implications with care, neither condemning the magazine or its publishers for seeking a mass audience, nor naively celebrating Ms. as a "true" mouthpiece of women everywhere. On the contrary, her text reveals the complexity of this idea: the difficult, and ultimately impossible, negotiations between commercial and social interests that the magazine attempted to negotiate, the possibilities created by a mass media periodical that addressed its audiences as political subjects, and the claim that readers made to make the magazine their own. Farrell's brilliant account of the history of Ms. comes at an important time as the publication has recently hit hard times. Some have argued that the magazine serves no useful purpose anymore, even that feminism is dead. After reading Farrell's book, it is clear to me that neither is true, and that both Ms. and feminism are involved in complex cultural dialogues and are continually evolving.