Feminism | Emma is out

The magazine polarized for decades. Now the editorial team is “tired”. Photo: dpa/Sina Schuldt “Emma” and I have been on a feminist first-name basis since I was born. After all, the magazine, almost 50 years old, has been around a little longer than I have. Now she is being hired for her big birthday. According to the Emma editorial team, there are no financial reasons for this. Even if the agitation by founder Alice Schwarzer for quick peace negotiations with Russia together with Sahra Wagenknecht in 2023 led to one in five readers canceling their subscription. The workforce is simply “tired.”

There is no editorial team that has such continuity as that of “Emma,” said Schwarzer in a Spiegel interview at the beginning of this year. For the most part, the same women have been working in the small team for decades. Attempts to recruit new colleagues failed. Maybe - this is purely speculative of course - the dog is buried here.

How hard Schwarzer tried to hand over her figurehead to another person is questionable. After all, Emma has rarely distinguished herself for her feminist solidarity in recent years. This is also reflected in today's press release. With the magazine, the “world’s last and only professional consumer magazine on kiosks in feminist hands” is saying goodbye. The editors of “Missy” or “An.schläge” will thank you. Outside German-speaking countries, feminist publications are less likely to be offended by the swipe.

Could Schwarzer and her colleagues perhaps no longer be able to find successors because of their content? In their first decades they made important contributions to the feminist debate, to discussions about abortion, sexual violence or sexist medicine, which deserved respect.

With excitement about gender stars, discussions about bans on prostitution, headscarves, minarets, the mixing of legitimate criticism of religion with anti-Muslim racism, as well as transphobic attacks and right-wing ideological accusations, “Emma” has long seemed like the great aunt who simply doesn't get up from the table after family dinner.

Particularly in the hunt for so-called political Islam and "trans ideology" - a term taken from right-wing discourses by "Emma" - the magazine became the poster child of a theorem that ignores complex power structures in favor of simple dichotomies. And this in times when differentiated, inclusive feminism is even more important. It is a gap that “Emma” could not or did not want to fill. Hopefully others will take over now.