Sassy Covers
Ms. Junior
Issue #31
An exclusive excerpt from the book, How Sassy Changed My Life
By Kara Jesella & Marisa Meltzer
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
At first, Ms. magazine seemed like a funny place to carry an ad for a teen magazine that heralded celebrities, makeup, fashion, and cute boys. Ms., which was founded in 1972 to be the mouthpiece of the then-burgeoning Second Wave of the women’s liberation movement, had a reputation for refusing to cozy up to any of those topics, preferring to focus on political, legal, and socioeconomic issues like war, sexual harassment, and breaking through the glass ceiling. Ms. was supposed to be an alternative to the softer, more conciliatory “Seven Sisters” — the industry name for recipe-, fashion-, and marriage counseling–heavy women’s titles like Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, and McCall’s. Because Ms. refused to offer “complementary copy” — stories to make you want to buy the products in the publication’s ads — the magazine remained a struggling not-for-profit until Sandra Yates came along.
“I’m going to prove you can run a business with feminist principles and make money,” Sandra told The New York Times in 1988. In the beginning, she did. Sassy had been on the market for just a month when Fairfax decided to divest its U.S. properties by April of that year. Sandra and Dr. Anne Summers joined forces to create Matilda Publications and bought Sassy and Ms. in only the second leveraged buyout in U.S. corporate history to be led by women. “I think there was definitely this idea that Sassy would be this sort of prep school for future Ms. readers,” says Karen Catchpole, one of Sassy’s writers. The pair led Ms. to its highest-ever circulation at 550,000; Sassy’s circulation was soaring as well.
The Sassy staff was excited by the new relationship. By and large, they had grown up with feminist Ms.-reading mothers. Jane Pratt, the magazine’s editor in chief, listened to Free to Be You and Me as a kid; she and her mom marched in support of the ERA. Christina Kelly, another writer, had a mom who “was what her ‘father calls a ‘Women’s Libber,’” she recalls. “But she was a suburban mom. She was no Betty Friedan.” Neither was most of the Sassy staff. But if they weren’t activists, waving placards and conducting sit-ins like the women at Ms., they had grown up reaping the benefits of the women’s movement. They went to college at a time when women’s studies departments were on the rise, priming them to think that anything was possible, and that there was nothing more normal than to deconstruct gender roles.
But despite a shared owner and political impetus, “The Ms. and Sassy people didn’t really interact,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, who started working at Ms. in 1992 and, as the publication’s youngest staff member, was one of the few to befriend the teen-magazine editors. “The Sassy people were very intimidated by the Ms. people because we were supposedly the intellectual and serious feminists. And the Ms. people were intimidated by the Sassy people because they were stylish and knew Michael Stipe.”
But even if the Sassy staff never felt embraced by their feminist elders, the sight of Gloria Steinem in the communal bathroom was still a thrill. Did they look up to the activists across the hall? “Absolutely, yes,” says Karen. “But then I think we were doing our own thing. I think we recognized that the language that they were using wouldn’t be right for our readers.”
And Sassy had to do their own thing if they were going to reach young girls. Feminism had a persistent PR problem, and not just among teenagers. Throughout the eighties and nineties, mass media continued to portray the women’s movement as a crusade led by a few angry, man-hating women to bring down the family, the economy, and American life as we know it. A 1989 Time magazine article claimed that “to the young, the movement that loudly rejected female stereotypes seems hopelessly dated.” And while Time is guilty of frequent exaggerated declarations that feminism is dead, it’s true that by the time Sassy readers were in high school, the Second Wave’s consciousness-raising sessions — women-only get-togethers during which they traded truths about their lives — seemed hopelessly dorky. In a way, a commercial magazine with advertisements for eye shadow and Doc Martens was the perfect place for the Sassy staff to get out the message that girls were equal to boys, that the right to abortion was imperative, and that being smart was more important than being popular. Sassy was like a Trojan horse, reaching girls who weren’t necessarily looking for a feminist message.
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