Abortion may be the issue that brings America new leadership, according to feminists from the landmark magazine Ms. speaking at a Corte Madera bookstore this week.
“The Dobbs decision woke up a sleeping giant. It’s big enough that it’s deciding elections,” said Katherine Spillar, executive editor of Ms., referring to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court action that took away the constitutional right to abortion.
Spillar, who also is executive director of the nonprofit Feminist Majority Foundation (which has published Ms. since 2001), was among the speakers appearing Wednesday at Book Passage to promote the new anthology, “50 Years of Ms: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution” (516 pages, Knopf, $50, released Sept. 19).
The hour-long panel also included Ms. Managing Editor Camille Hahn and two local contributors to the book: Santa Cruz Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press journalist Martha Mendoza, and Carol Seajay, co-founder of the defunct Old Wives Tales bookstore and Feminist Bookstore News in San Francisco.
Describing the volume, which includes plenty of eye-catching images of Ms. magazine covers, Spillar said, “We wanted to pool articles that show the range of issues this movement has tackled,” while Hahn elaborated on Ms.’ evolution.
“There isn’t a mainstream news source that looks at issues through a feminist lens,” said Hahn, adding that while identifying and explaining problems was the Ms. mission at the outset in 1972, today, “We bring to the media landscape solutions to the problems that have been plaguing us.”
Noting that social change is cyclical, Seajay, whose piece in the anthology from 1992 is “Twenty Years of Feminist Bookstores,” pointed to a recent resurgence in the field: “There have been waves. It’s so amazing to see what’s being published now,” she said.
Seajay, who was 23 when Ms. began, said the publication, which “changed the world,” was snapped up quickly from the news stand. At the time, she, along with other radical feminists and clergyman, were doing underground abortion counseling.
In her 2004 Ms. story “Between a Woman and Her Doctor,” which was nominated for a National Magazine Award, Mendoza described her trauma when she was 19 weeks pregnant with what would have been her fourth child and learned that her fetus was not alive.
Even in the Bay Area, treatment options (particularly dilations and evacuations and dilations and extractions, procedures in which larger fetuses are removed from the womb) were few.
“There’s nothing we can do. You can just deliver the stillborn,” she was told, which is what happened.
“Physicians are not trained to take a fetus out of a uterus after 13 weeks,” Mendoza said. Wanting to raise awareness that some 25,000 American women have a stillborn annually, as well as seeking a safe space to tell her personal story, she took it to Ms. rather than the AP, where she worked, saying, “I brought it to Ms. because I knew I’d be taken care of.”
Meanwhile, Spillar said, “We have the power to mobilize around the abortion issue. The issue is not dying. It’s a powerful engine that will pool our people to the polls.”
With measures being passed by significant margins today that are overturning abortion bans and restrictions in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana, she said, “We’re defeating these terrible measures by Republican-controlled legislatures. We’re clawing our way back.”
Likewise, “50 Years of Ms.,” Hahn said, “makes a darned strong case for the ERA. We need women in the Constitution.”
Mentioning a 2022 poll by Lake Research Partners that found 74 percent of women in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, Spillar said the size of the feminist movement is larger than ever, adding, “We have no choice but to fight.”