Mary J. Blige

Kudos to Essence Magazine for honoring October as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month!  Their editors appreciate that 1.3 million women is a greater audience than 200,000.  Their cover story about Mary J. Blige’s  mission to save women from poverty and abuse is in the color purple!

The magazine honored the fact that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month too.

O, The Oprah Magazine similarly honored both causes.  “With This Rage, I Thee Wed” on page 167 by Kim Barnes is about how she and her husband resolved the issue of his rage in their marriage: 

I’ve come to realize that you never know the secrets of someone else’s marriage—but that when it comes to your own, it’s better to break the silence before the silence breaks you. I couldn’t hear the truth until I gave it voice, and neither could Bob. By reaching out for help, we chose to leave the isolated island of shame and blame and hitch ourselves to something truer than a perfect marriage: a union defined by our desire to grow beyond our flaws. Today Bob’s rages are a thing of the past, the occasional tremors like the fading aftershocks of an earthquake (and my zero-tolerance policy proof of my own shored-up foundation). Still, when Lacey turned the tables on me—”What flaw would you choose?”—I didn’t give it a second thought.

“Anything but wrath.”

The magazine also has an on-line posting of where to get help for domestic violence.  I was impressed because they listed resources like Amy’s Courage Fund at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) which gives up to $2,000 in emergency assistance to women who need to flee domestic violence.  They also provided a toll free number for Face to Face (800-842-4546) which provides reconstructive surgery for domestic violence injuries.

Cosmopolitan gets an honorable mention from me for “True Crime:  How She Outsmarted a Brutal Rapist” on page 148.  The story is about how Shanai Woodard escaped from a kidnapper-rapist-murderer in Queens, NY by throwing herself out of a moving van.

Vanity Fair similarly took the true crime route in their cover story “Catching the Craigslist Killer” by Maureen Orth on page 156.

Psychology Today gets a mention for “When to kiss a cad goodbye” on page 42.

Let’s hope that next October the editors of Body + Soul, Family Circle, Glamour, Ladies Home Journal, Prevention, Self, Vogue, Pink, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Redbook, and Harper’s Bazaar contemplate the statistics on the prevelance of domestic violence versus breast cancer and opt to embrace both causes in their editorial content.

Bravo to the editors of Essence and O the Oprah Magazine for valuing our lives with your editorial choices!