“I will fight for those who cannot fight for themselves” (Wonder Woman 37:18). This declaration of promise has echoed across American public consciousness from the birth of the Wonder Woman comics to the character’s resurgence in the 2017 title film. More than a heroic tagline, this statement presents a broader necessity to advocate and intervene in uplifting marginalized groups who have faced historic and cultural exclusion. Books, magazines, and print media are deeply embedded sites of power that are never neutral and impact public consciousness. Who is able to hold space in these mediums and how their message becomes translated after moving through the publishing circuit comes a central force of shaping a society’s cultural awareness and narratives. While historically this power has resided within patriarchal control, Ms. magazine became the first modern magazine publication to hit newsstands in 1972. As the magazine broke through prior power structures to claim editorial authority for women and reimagine journalism as a possibility for feminist leadership, it disrupted male mediation of authorship and circulation and redefined the public perception of the contemporary woman to support the era’s feminist movement. By using the image of Wonder Woman on the inaugural cover of the first woman-ran publication, Ms. magazine heroizes deviations from the traditional male-dominated communications circuit to champion female leaders and narratives. This branding of the cover not only elevates female leadership, but reengineers the magazine as an opportune media for female control that grants active entry into the editorial sphere instead of passive participation. 

Founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem with pioneering female journalists and editors, Ms. magazine was a revolutionary and daring publication for women’s rights and mass journalism. In an age of restricted women’s rights, limited protections for women, and a dominating culture of domesticity, Ms. launched as a one-shot sample funded by New York Magazine and sold out nationwide in eight days. Prior to Ms., women’s magazines were male-ran and reinforced female subordination as articles supported advertisers’ interests and these works presented as catalogues for women to befit desirability for the male gaze. With the feminist movement finding its legs again for the Second Wave emergence in the 1960s, Ms. stood as a spearhead for independence, as Steinem’s aim with her team was to translate the movement into a magazine accessible to the everyday woman afflicted with such struggles. As the publication’s all women team presented taboo topics like pornography, abortions, and sexual pleasure, “Ms. was the first national magazine to make feminist voices audible, feminist journalism tenable and a feminist worldview available to the public” (Ms.). In understanding the significance of Wonder Woman running into the feminist conversations via the cover, it is crucial to acknowledge this historical significance of Ms. breaking female silences that had been muted or obscured through traditional publishing and prior women’s magazines that did speak the truths of their lives. Whereas many of the founding women of Ms. had prior journalistic expertise, in their roles at male-controlled publications, they recall experiences of being viewed as professionally inept and directed by male editorial authority on how to write on women. Thus, by establishing this new female channel of where women are able to organize and amplify their political voice, they seize greater control of the communications circuit that Darton explains, “runs full cycle. It transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing to printed characters and back to thought again” (Darnton 67). As Darnton points to meaning not being fixed and it being both amassed and subject to altering at each stage of production, the creation of Ms. not only resulted in a new magazine, it allowed women to seize control of this cycle for the first time and restructure frameworks of representation. As such, women’s work was not presented with the approval of male authority and it became a continuous loop of female governance, a feat that Wonder Woman represents on behalf of all the female contributors.

With the depiction of Wonder Woman on the first cover, Ms. magazine utilizes a superheroine whose mythology valorizes the liberation of the oppressed and women to represent their founders’ mission of fearlessly asserting female power through the page. Though not the first female superhero, Wonder Woman’s creation in 1941 by psychologist, William Moulton, and artist, Harry G. Peter, for DC Comics was profound for being an independent titular character rather than a male counterpart with her own profound strength and magical capabilities. As Moulton believed in ushering in a “new type of woman” to correct issues he observed in his practice, “He proposed that Wonder Woman, a character sprung from a matriarchal utopia, might serve as an antidote to what he saw as the destructive and domineering practices of male politicians” (Smith). Mirroring the same frustrations, Ms. utilizes the symbolism of this superheroine and her origin stories of female empowerment as an emblem of structural resistance against the communications circuit and larger society that pushed women into secondary or background positions. With this selection of recognizable iconography for the first cover, Wonder Woman communicates the values Ms. and offers a point of entry through the image offering an invitation. This selection was especially crucial for the magazine’s founding as the publication was not yet established and readers may have been unfamiliar with feminist theory as a rising movement of the period. Thus, through the creation of a bridge between popular culture and feminist critique, Ms. utilizes the collective knowledge of Wonder Woman as a communication mechanism for the immediate establishment of women’s narratives, leadership, and power.

Although Wonder Woman’s costuming has been the subject of great debate over whether her limited clothing is truly empowering to women, in the context of Ms. magazine, her dress can be understood as intrinsically tied to American identity, connecting women to ideals of independence and liberation. Modeled after a pin-up girl in her conception, Peter described his collaboration with Moulton as “intended to represent a bold, independent, and strong female character” (De Daux 62). It is worth noting, however, that first iterations of Wonder Woman resulted from two men imagining how female embodiment of these traits appear. Still, the costume with its golden eagle, star-spangled shorts, and patriotic palette works as nationalist motifs that show women as civic participants in America’s founding values of democracy. Through this stance in the feminist struggle being a democratic pursuit instead of a fringe issue, Wonder Woman connects female liberation to being an American endeavor relevant to national identity. In considering how this fashion impacts feminist interpretation of Wonder Woman’s character, American feminist and historian, Jill Lepore, suggests, “Wonder Woman isn’t only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s” (Marcus 56). On the cover, rather than denying Wonder Woman her small leotard, Ms. acknowledges the dual possibilities of womanhood by combining her identities of a pin-up and suffragette to make her powerful both in her civic role and personal embodiment. Additionally, the depiction of Wonder Woman in Ms. allows her to keep her female figure with breasts but the cartoon line that runs down the center of her chest in the original cartoon to create cleavage is removed. This compromise allows for the preservation of femininity and reduces potential for sexualization by exemplifying beauty in agency and challenging the false dichotomy of appearance affecting capability. As Ms. does not reject popular imagery created by men but reclaims and redefines what femininity looks like from a feminist perspective, they redirect Darnton’s male-defined communications circuit to one of female governance. The cover of a work being a reader’s first entry point into the communications circuit of a work informs how this work should be engaged, thus, Wonder Woman on the cover visually announces female leadership. This representation reorients not only who may participate in the communications circuit, but who can lead it and how these channels can be transformed into spaces of sustained female power.

In continuing from who Wonder Woman is and how she appears as a woman in the context of Ms., it is important to zoom out and consider how she is depicted in the surrounding America that she serves. The scale of her body in this image is giant as she towers above the town and the civilians in the street look microscopic under her magnitude. Her presence as she runs forward is dominating and unable to be dismissed even with the chaos of the surrounding scene. Comic book historian, Tim Hanley interprets this scene:

She was a giant, striding forward, with half of her body in an average American street on the left and the other half in a Vietnam War scene on the right. The image suggested that Wonder Woman could be a force for good in both worlds; in one hand, she rescued a group of buildings with her golden lasso, and with her other hand she swatted a fighter plane out of the sky. (Hanley 172)

Taking in her size and this resulting ability to split-scene between America and the Vietnam War happening at the time of this publication, Wonder Woman reveals how women are present and larger than the expectations placed on them in the sociopolitical spheres they inhabit. This borderless imagery presents how female leadership is capable and relevant on all scales from domestic to global. The military, a male-dominated and often still sexist entity of power, has historically excluded female participation entirely or placed women in roles away from combat and leadership. As Wonder Woman, in this scene, has one hand in saving Americans with her golden lasso of truth and the other swatting a fighter jet out of the sky, she communicates the omnipresence of women and how their labor and efforts impact all areas of life. Additionally, with one foot extended backwards out of the scene and the other coming forward almost off of the page, Wonder Woman reveals how women have presence in the past and will have presence in the future as active agents in progress.

The visual excess of Wonder Woman in size, motion, and reach amidst the surrounding scene of chaos implies the crisis that has ensued from male dominance and reveals how a large female intervention is needed to fix society’s plaguing issues. This intentional forceful and forward movement mirrors that of Ms.’s entry into the male-dominated publishing industry and communications circuit. In this breakthrough, like how Wonder Woman is visible in this context as an active agent of change rather than a passive participant in the domestic, Ms. magazine argues for women as producers of meaning rather than subjects of male narratives. Like in Darnton’s communications circuit where power does not stem from participation but from production and circulation of messages in each stage of the process, Wonder Woman does not ask for entry into this scene, she dominates it and it reshapes around her. Likewise, in its initial creation, Ms. did not ask for inclusion in the preexisting editorial hierarchies, they made their own channels for women to control their messaging and participate in the media without preapproval. As Wonder Woman bounds onto the scene like Ms.’s imposition on newsstands produced and controlled by men, barriers of entry are lowered for women in publishing with female-made opportunities. Female leadership in this format is not supplemental, it is corrective. Carrying the American town in the lasso of truth, the magazine’s honest sharing of all facets of women’s lives results in saving society from one voice that has shown results of crisis rather than stability. This act of rescuing the female voice and through the magazine works to defeat structural violence that results from the distortion and silencing of marginalized voices by extending the presence of female publication practices into the lived public political consciousness.

Observing further the political circumstances of the cover, the release of this issue came at a time when women were organizing to gain political voice such as the National Organization of Women (NOW), New York Radical Women, and the Redstockings had emerged in the late 1960s. Across the top of the cover, in a bold red block reads, “Wonder Woman For President” as a direct call that is unmistakable and can not be misconstrued by interpretations of meaning. This proclamation situates Wonder Woman as a potential national leader, which, in part, was inspired by Shirley Chisholm making history as the first Black woman elected to Congress who was running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at the time of Ms.’s first issue. As the city below has raised a sign calling for “Peace and Justice in ‘72,” the people in the street are not neutral to Wonder Woman’s presence as they raise her arms up to her as if celebrating her heroism. As this ask for peace and justice has not been achieved through the world being male-controlled, the society shows an openness and desire for societal intervention. The timing of this issue’s release also coincides with the Fourth of July, tightening the connection between Wonder Woman’s and American ideals of liberty and justice. With the cover’s imagery revealing a national need for new leadership for the betterment of American society, the imposition of Ms. offers its publication as a way forward and solution to previous issues of marginalization in the traditional communications circuit. Like Wonder Woman crashing into this comic scene, Ms.’s break into the public news cycle caught great media attention, showing the strength of this cover in functioning as symbolic and material advocacy of feminism. Therefore, feminist media and its production not only represents women’s experiences but it alters societal structures and has the capacity to shift political landscapes that fail those marginalized by power.

The appearance of Wonder Woman on the inaugural cover of the Ms. extends far beyond symbolic empowerment and has had lasting implications in public action and female publishing opportunities–a shift that Ms. defined and was the vanguard of. Shortly before the release of this first issue, DC Comics had revoked Wonder Woman’s superpowers which came as a great disappointment for Gloria Steinem who had been a fan of the character since her girlhood and was a prominent leader of the feminist movement at the time of this decision. With choosing Wonder Woman as the magazine’s cover and the issue featuring an essay on the heroine’s history and role to feminism, the magazine did significant work in initiating a lobbying for the restoration of the superheroine’s abilities which would occur a year after the publication’s release in 1973. In the time since the first cover, Ms. has continued to use Wonder Woman on the covers of their anniversary issues to represent female achievement and steady resilience shown by women actively producing, shaping, circulating, and correcting meaning as needed. Such successes of the magazine to accurately represent female narratives and interests and resist dilution speaks to the over fifty years of strength upheld by Ms. and the significance of woman-ran publishing. Through scholarship on feminist periodicals, the impact of works like Ms. can be understood as American Periodicals presents:

Contemporary feminist periodicals are important political and historical documents for much more than the textual traces they leave behind. (1) they examine the political commitments and practical impacts of often low-budget production; (2) they consider the capacity for periodical publishers, contributors, and readers to build and narrate communities both imagined and real; and (3) they integrate frequently forgotten and marginalized texts and narratives into feminist theories and ways that expand current understandings of the past.  (Jordan and Meagher 96)

Despite struggles with maintaining advertisers to contribute to the funding of the magazine and its liberal stances, Ms. has upheld its political commitments to feminism which has had modern-day impacts in publishing and the larger American society to view women as fully formed figures without male intervention. Additionally, while Ms. now has enough longevity that its early issues may be studied as archival models of feminist study and the history of female publishing, the magazine is not merely an archive. Considering how it is “much more than the textual traces they leave behind,” the existence of Ms. and female periodicals effectively perform feminism through halting the erasure of female stories and platforming the voices that tell them as foundational, not supplemental to history. Wonder Woman’s cover appearance enacts this practice both in the scene by centering women as necessary to all areas of society and politics, and off the page in the powerful ability of Ms. to provide entry to women in publishing and maintain Wonder Woman’s relevancy in pop culture. Taking Darnton’s framework of the communications circuit with the impacts outlined by Jordan and Meagher, the female construction of a feminist magazine reveals how meaning does not end with the finished production of a publication, rather it circulates out to readers and integrates into social consciousness. The Wonder Woman cover, in imagery and its story of conception and resulting impact, narrativizes this process of meaning’s mobilization and how magazines actively do the work of feminism more than just describing or reporting it. In seizing control of the publishing process, Ms. presents a pathway forward for feminism and female authorship from gendered oppression to liberation. In heroizing the departure from a traditionally patriarchal communications circuit to champion the female voice and leadership, Ms. magazine positions the magazine as a site of female media control with Wonder Woman representing this forward movement. By transforming this familiar icon on female strength that already preexisted in public consciousness, Ms. asserts that women can not only be subject to sociopolitical discourse, but have the ability to lead it. In reflecting on the magazine when it reached its fifth anniversary of production, Steinem reflected on its founding, “There was no national voice for those of us who had the radical idea that women are people” (Steinem). Speaking of her founding of Ms. due to large gaps in representation, Steinem reveals the urgent and ethical need she found in American media for women’s voices to be acknowledged as fully capable of speaking to women’s issues. Much like Wonder Woman’s promise to “fight for those who cannot fight for themselves,” Ms. carries Steinem’s mission as a commitment to collective structural advocacy when patriarchal entities limit or deny pathways to authorship, visibility, or accessibility. By insisting on a woman’s full humanity and dismantling the guise of marginalizing women’s voices as needed for marketability, Ms. did not place their content in an old circuit; it restructured the circuit to demolish the gatekeepers. As a young woman beginning my pursuits in the editorial industry, the legacy of Ms. to the ability of women to work in publishing makes my entry and work in the magazine space possible. Though the industry is still heavily gatekeep, Ms. has set the groundwork for magazines to be taken seriously as scholarly representations of female leadership and has women’s self-sufficiency to produce and represent their own work. By creating my own female-ran and feminist magazine, I have entered a lineage begun and made possible by Ms. that presents women as heroes of their own voices.

Works Cited 

“About Ms.” Ms. Magazine, Feminist Majority Foundation, https://msmagazine.com/about/

Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 65–83.

De Dauw, E. Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic Books. Rutgers University Press, 2021.

Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print. Directed by Salima Koroma and Alice Gu, HBO Documentary Films, 2025.

Jordan, Tessa, and Michelle Meagher. “Introduction: Feminist Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 93–104. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26528615. 

Marcus, Jaclyn. “Wonder Woman’s Costume as a Site for Feminist Debate.” Imaginations (Edmonton, Alberta), vol. 9, no. 2, 2018, pp. 55–65, https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.FCM.9.2.6.

Smith, Philip. “Wonder Woman for President.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 4, no. 3, 2018, pp. 227–43, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.3.227.

Steinem, Gloria. “We Are Not Alone: 50 Years of Ms. Magazine.” Literary Hub, 20 Sept. 2023, https://lithub.com/we-are-not-alone-50-years-of-ms-magazine/Wonder Woman. Directed by Patty Jenkins, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017.