01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print' Review: The Language of Liberation on HBO
'I do not agree with your last article,' wrote an early correspondent to the now 53-year-old Ms. magazine, 'and am canceling my wife's subscription.' For younger female viewers of 'Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print,' such moments—and there are plenty—may be jaw-dropping. Older women will just smile. Maybe. No one will escape without feeling like they've taken a trip into something weirdly, even darkly, historical.
Not historical enough, perhaps. While this nearly two-hour documentary triptych seldom exploits the comedy in people being quoted outside of their cultural moment, neither does it address the current perception that nearly everything Ms. magazine lobbied for is under attack by various factions governmental and/or religious. The ostensible motivation for this movie right now is the more than half-century of Ms., founded in 1971 by a group that included Gloria Steinem, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Pat Carbine and first editor Suzanne Braun Levine, all of whom appear here. (The magazine, which first hit the newsstands in '72, is now online, published since 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation.) But the omissions seem odd: During a segment regarding the coinage of 'sexual harassment' and the ensuing battles over that issue, no mention is made of the 1991 Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, which seemed to be the pivotal event in that particular fight. The oversights seem a conscious effort to skirt political fire. No pun intended.
