While Sarah Connor was the main character of both Terminator films, because of his megastar status at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger scored most magazine covers promoting Terminator 2: judgment Day. The New York Magazine was one of those rare occasions outside the Health and Fitness magazines that gave the cover to Linda Hamilton in her Sarah Connor gear.
The feature article, which promotes T2 in the magazine's July 1991 issue, is called Killer Women and talks about the then recent spike in the numbers of strong female characters in movies, grouping the likes of Thelma and Louise along with Sarah Connor. It's very hard to figure out where the author of the article, who is a female, stands. While she notes that the character of Sarah is still a woman, because despite her composure, muscles and ferocity, she still cries, it seems to me like the author suggests that those strong women in films were created as new action heroes for men's entertainment. If so, of course it would have been quite a puzzling stance especially coming from a woman, as many women felt empowered by those strong characters and their impact is felt even to this day. Still though, seeing how many times Julie Baumgold, the author of the article, underlines the fact that despite her toughness and macho image Sarah is still a woman as she cries and gets overwhelmed by emotions, I'd say the article is praising this "new" breed of movie women.
The author also describes the movie as very politically correct: "Terminator 2 is a totally politically correct movie. The villain is a dark blond, light eyed small nosed LA cop made of molten metal. The hero is dark, foreign, and wears bad to the bone biker leather. Miles Dyson, the genius scientist who will give up his work and his life to save humanity, is black. He is the head genius of the computer lab filled with stumbling whities. There are warm hearted, child hugging Mexican revolutionaries living quietly with their junkyard arsenal in the desert. The good dark people vs bad Aryans (one licks Hamilton's face while she is held by restraints) and sad Dr.Silberman, the nervous Jew"
Baumgold also noticed the uniqueness of the score: "It is filled with a clunk of steel, the sounds of hardware and metal like a trap shutting on an animal paw"
It's good to see Linda being given prime spotlight on the cover of something that's not a gym magazine
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