Ms. Finds Some Muscle

As carpenters hammered and drilled away in Ms. magazine’s not-yet-finished Beverly Hills offices, Tracy Wood--named this week the publication’s new editor in chief--sat down to talk about the future of the often-struggling feminist publication co-founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem.

Given that Wood is a former investigative journalist for The Times and the Orange County Register, it is no surprise that she intends to pursue hard-edged stories. “I’m a news person,” she says. “I’m not fluffy.”

She speaks of investigative stories that “will have an immediate focus on women, but a larger focus on society as a whole. There are some obvious areas. All you have to do is look at the Taliban. Right away they went after women. Wherever that happens, there has to be a voice that’s not afraid and speaks very clearly and has a wide audience.”

She wants Ms. stories to expose wrongdoing and to spur reactions “that protect women from those kinds of overt abuses.” Further, Wood says, the magazine--which last year was bought by the Feminist Majority Foundation and is now operating as a nonprofit--will “absolutely” have more of an international focus, with a regular world section under the direction of an editor “very experienced in world affairs,” not necessarily an American journalist, but “somebody to help us keep track of all the major things that affect women--such as world slavery--and put them in context.”

Wood, who grew up in Fanwood, a small New Jersey town, knew early on that she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So off she went to the University of Missouri to study journalism--and was persuaded by CBS correspondents visiting the university to opt instead for a broader curriculum. She wound up with a dual major in economic geography and religious philosophy but left college at the end of three years when a summer job at City News Service in Los Angeles, where her parents had relocated, led to a permanent job offer.

She then joined the UPI news agency, which sent her to Sacramento and New York and, in the spring of 1972, to Vietnam as a combat correspondent. She has chronicled her experiences there in a book, “War Torn: Stories of War From the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam,” to be published in August by Random House. It is a compilation of the stories of nine women who covered that war from “before it was even on people’s horizon up through the last emergency helicopter evacuation.”

Her chapter, Wood says, is titled “Spies, Lovers and Prisoners of War,” which “kind of sums it up. It covers how I got there, which was over the objections of the foreign editor, who did not want to send a woman, and my introduction to combat. We were all in our 20s, and virtually none of us had any combat experience. We learned on the scene how to cover a war and learned firsthand what death looks like close up.”

It was a defining moment in her life, “my coming of age. There’s a part of you that wishes you never had gone because it hardens you, but life hardens people one way or another.” Wood covered the arrival in Saigon of the Viet Cong and the release of the American prisoners of war in Hanoi.

It is that background in hard news that she will bring to Ms. She is reluctant to talk about specific stories that will run in the Oct. 1 issue, the first under her stewardship, for fear of being scooped. But she promises that Ms. will cover everything from sports to current events and that “even the features will have a news edge.”

Despite the magazine’s shaky financial history, Wood says, she jumped at the chance to be editor. “If you’re an investigative person and a woman, it’s almost like they created the job for me.” But she said her hard-news orientation does not preclude publication of fiction and poetry, as has been traditional. Some of the issues Ms. will continue to address are ones it tackled 30 years ago. Domestic violence, for example, has not gone away, Wood says, but “today there are places for women to go” so it’s no longer a matter of being “out there banging on walls” to call attention to the problem. Rather, “we have to look at what still needs to be done, and we also have to support what has been done.”

The anti-abortion forces are going to be fighting “till their last breath,” Wood says--just as Ms. will be fighting for a woman’s right to choose. “There’s no change there.”

Workplace issues still need to be resolved. In her generation, says Wood, who is in her 50s, “we made choices” within an imperfect system. But today’s young women often are trying to figure out how not to lose ground in the career race without shortchanging their husbands, children and themselves. “Child care is still a massive issue.” Wood hopes this type of story will attract the young readers it seeks. (She estimates the magazine’s average reader is between 35 and 50).

Wood, who never married, says she realized she was not one of those women who can have it all and do everything equally well. “I looked at marriage as a genuine commitment, and I never wanted to shortchange either my husband or children.”

She lives in Fullerton, where she is on the vestry of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. She enjoys sailing and camping but, she says, “I’m not one of those ‘see how fast I can get to the top of this hill’ types. I like to sit under the trees and enjoy the trees and the sky.” Basically, she says, “I’m a quiet person. I’m a reader,” as well as a writer. She is working now on a novel centered on a murder.

Ms., the first national circulation magazine to come out of the women’s movement, claimed at its peak in 1976 a paid circulation of 500,000. But early on it found itself in conflict content-wise and philosophically with its advertisers, notably losing a $250,000-a-year Philip Morris account for balking at the company’s “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” campaign for Virginia Slims. The magazine felt the ads infantilized women and bristled at the depiction of smoking as a sign of women’s progress.

For almost a decade, starting in 1979, Ms. published as a nonprofit under the aegis of the Ms. Foundation for Education. It then was sold twice before being relaunched in 1990 as an ad-free, reader-supported publication. Six years later, it was purchased by MacDonald Communications, which published Working Mother and the now-defunct Working Woman. The fit was not a good one, and publication of Ms. was suspended in 1998. To save the magazine, a consortium of feminists, including Steinem, bought it. It was Steinem who last summer proposed selling it to the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Foundation president Eleanor Smeal had some initial concerns. Among them: that those who fund specific foundation projects would think their money was going to the magazine. The foundation, a leading feminist research and action organization--boosted by a $10-million endowment from Peg Yorkin of Los Angeles--has used its funding to campaign against gender apartheid in Afghanistan and to bring the abortion pill mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486) to the United States. Still, Smeal says, “we wanted to keep this independent feminist voice,” so the foundation decided to buy the magazine.

Now, with Ms., Smeal says, “the thing we want to do for sure is to make news. We want to have freelancers and stringers, feminists from abroad, contributing regularly, so we can cover areas that are hot from a feminist perspective” and before they are picked up in the mainstream media.

The mission of Ms. has changed in the last 30 years, Smeal says, in that “the movement has so matured and there are a huge number of women’s-rights organizations and feminist organizations worldwide. We want people to know who’s doing what, taking action, and to empower people.”

Through its affiliation with the Feminist Majority Foundation, which has offices in Arlington, Va., as well as Beverly Hills, Ms. gains considerable resources, including a medical expert and a global research department. And, by moving from costly Manhattan offices to space shared with the foundation (once home to the Beverly Hills Bridge Club--”Is that a hoot?” laughs Yorkin, who bought the building) there is a significant financial savings. With a combined newsstand and subscription circulation of about 110,000, Wood says, “we’re close to breaking even. But we’re going to have to increase those [numbers] substantially. We have to grow in order to finance some of the things we want to do down the road,” including costly investigative reporting. The foundation will take up the slack, certainly for the first year.

“We’re hoping to get some other partners,” Smeal says. “We’re looking for foundation funding. We’d like to partner with a group, for example, that’s interested in environmental news, to cover eco-feminism issues on a regular basis.” The Ford Foundation has given $50,000 to help set up the world reporting desk.

Steinem remains involved as a consulting editor. It was she who wrote a letter sent in mid-February to Ms. subscribers with a new approach, an invitation to become a member of the Ms. community by giving to an investigative fund or perhaps buying subscriptions for women in prison or for women’s-studies programs. The response, Smeal says, was “tremendous. The average gift is way above the subscription [cost]” of $25 a year.

Ms. will resume publishing every other month starting in January. There are plans to open a bureau in Washington, D.C.

Wood wants Ms. to be an “inclusive” magazine, one that will consider printing “intelligent discussion,” even of opposing views. “If they want to discuss [issues] in a civil way, then I’m open to it. I speak softly. I don’t run over people.”

Does she, perhaps, think the Ms. of years past was a bit too strident? “I think there were times when probably Ms. could not be strident enough,” she says. “But, like a car, you don’t always drive it in fifth gear.”