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Letters to Ms.: Building a Feminist Community in the Borderlands of Women’s
Magazines
This paper is about building community through letter writing. It grows out of a textual
analysis of 660 Letters to the Editor and 30 Editorials that appeared in Ms. magazine over
a five-year period beginning in September 1993. Originally drawn to Ms. because of its
extensive Letters to the Editor section – at that time, each issue was running between five
and seven pages of lengthy, essay-like contributions from readers as opposed to the usual
half to one page of three-liner letters found in most women’s magazines – what this
unprecedented level of actual reader presence alerted me to was the potential of the letter
to move the reader beyond the usual role of recipient of the mediated message, to that of
active co-producer of a magazine text.
If my findings highlighted how in giving readers a highly visible voice, a magazine could
turn this traditionally limited feedback mechanism into a lively site of debate and
Bakhtinian-style dialogism, the aim of the study was to discover how readers used their
letters to negotiate belonging to this ad-free, fully reader-supported American feminist
magazine, and in so doing, engage in the process of building a feminist textual
community.
This paper focuses in on this process, and works through some of the problems inherent
in applying the term “community” to a group of “writerly-readers” (Barthes, 1976) whose
only connection to each other is through the printed word. To this end, I will discuss three
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