TO HEAR GLORIA Steinem describe the Ms. magazine office during its inaugural year of 1972 calls to mind a feminist workers' utopia. The editorial team conducted meetings in a talking circle, passing a stick to indicate who was speaking. Salaries were need-based. When not in the “tot lot,” the art director's five-year-old delivered mail via tricycle.

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Fifty years later, to flip through the magazine’s first year is to fall into something of a time warp. “I didn’t anticipate, then,” says Steinem, “that I would be here at age 88 confronting not exactly the same versions of issues, but the same kinds of issues.” Childcare. Pay equality. Mass incarceration. Angela Davis on the importance of writing for, about, and by Black women. Cynthia Ozick on the absurdity of defining a person by their organs: “if anatomy were destiny, the wheel could not have been invented; we would have been limited by legs.”

“We just all had our desks wherever they could fit,” says Gloria Steinem of the original Ms. office. “I LIKED BEING TOGETHER with everybody else because YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO WRITE MEMOS. You could just call out to somebody else at another desk.”

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And abortion. “To many American women and men it seems absurd, in this allegedly enlightened age, that we should still be arguing for a simple principle: that a woman has the right to sovereignty over her own body,” reads a call to action signed by 53 women, including Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Billie Jean King, and Nora Ephron. It ran in the 1972 preview issue, released a year before the Roe v. Wade decision. (Of today’s debate over inclusive language, “You could just say ‘people with wombs,’ ” Steinem says, “it doesn't need to be complicated.”)

As in the pursuit of any nuanced cause, factions were nearly inevitable. Radical feminist Vivian Gornick would part ways with the magazine early on over philosophical differences; in the mid-’80s Alice Walker would resign, citing an unrealized desire for more people of color on the cover. (Gornick would remain a Ms. defender and Walker a friend of Steinem’s.) “There was always a consciousness that we were trying to do something that hadn't been done,” Steinem says of that time, “however imperfectly we’d be doing it.”

“The majority of the lawmakers...charged with deciding the fate of crucial legislation are MEN PAST THE AGE OF PARENTING,” wrote Maureen Orth in a May 1973 article. “They seem unable to grasp what it means to be a 32-YEAR-OLD WAGE EARNER responsible for THREE CHILDREN under the age of eight.”

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