NEW YORK ( LNS) “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman” runs the slogan of Ladies Home Journal, a monthly women’s magazine with a circulation of seven million.
Over a hundred radical women barged into the magazine’s editorial offices March 18 to bring substance to that slogan, demanding a liberated issue of the magazine.
Startled by the tactics of women from the National Organization of Women (NOW), the Feminists, Media Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists, who occupied the office for a full day, editor and publisher John Mack Carter promised to consider the demand.
For the first time in the magazine’s 87 depressing years, there may be some respite from the anti-woman exploitative advertising and role-reinforcing articles characteristic of all status-quo women’s magazines supporting the “feminine mystique.”
The protesters also demanded a monthly column, a day-care center for working mothers, a training program, an end to degrading advertising, and acceptance of freelance articles. Planning for their Women’s Liberation issue, which will contain articles on such topics as orgasm, birth control, abortion and the fashion racket, begins Monday, March 23, when they meet with Mr. Carter as a beginning of “the end of the second-class status of women in American society.”
When the women were finally persuaded to leave, Carter told reporters: “Although they have a point, they can’t have my job….”