This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzy Peabody. Suzanne Bédé. Suzanne Braun Levine will never forget her first day of work at Ms.

magazine. I was totally inappropriately dressed. What were you wearing?

I was wearing a cashmere pencil skirt and a pink silk blouse and a girdle.

And I walked into this tiny room full of broken down desks and you know typewriters set on boxes and as I remember

Gloria was sitting on the floor.

Suzanne was joining Gloria Steinum and a small team of feminist activists and writers

to launch a brand new magazine.

It was 1972, and Suzanne, in her early 30s was already a veteran of the

magazine industry. She'd worked at well-established ladies publications like

McCalls and Mademoiselle, but she realized pretty quickly that Ms magazine would be different.

There was a terrific energy, camaraderie, that I had never experienced.

She was coming from a different part of the magazine world, and we were sort of scruffy startups.

Joanne Edgar was a founding editor of Ms.

And she says when Suzanne joined the team,

they'd just released a preview of the publication,

a sample insert in New York magazine and the response was overwhelming.

The male person would come in dragging bag after bag of letters to the editor and letters

to Gloria talking about what the preview issue had meant to them and we

opened them all and read every single one of them it was truly amazing.

So what did you learn from reading those letters? What did you learn about what people were responding to?

It was a freedom to tell, say the secret things that you thought you were the only one or you were crazy.

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