Feminism and Women's Magazines

From their beginning more than three centuries ago, women's magazines have provided a public arena for debates and discourses about women's role in society. Their popularity is due not only to their offering a space for public discussion of women's concerns, but also for providing their readership with suggestions for and guidelines on everyday life issues, such as improving private relationships, beautifying the body, managing the household, spending leisure time, and buying and using commodities in the proper way. Many historical and cultural accounts have emphasized this medium's responsibility in contributing to the rise of women's consciousness of their identity as women, and in exciting the feeling of belonging to a group with specific interests and needs. They have been defined as the only products of pop culture that take women's concerns seriously, change with women's reality, and are mostly written by women, for women, about women's issues. Nevertheless, their female identity-marking topics have long been, and often still are, the target of a condemnation by feminist theorists and movement, accusing them of justifying patriarchal structures and beliefs.

This kind of criticism has been mostly addressed toward mass-distributed women's magazines in the industrial era. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the changing mode of production contributed to the modification of the roles of men and women in and out of the household. The public world became the domain of production and of men, while the private world of the house was gradually associated with domesticity, intimate affections, and women. At the same time, a sizable middle class who worked hard and increased their wealth was set apart from both the aristocracy and the new working class; therefore, new kinds of consumption and taste patterns were established. These changes strongly affected periodicals' potential readership. Up to this point, such periodicals were addressed to upper-class women interested in fashion, literature, and leisure time; they also presented articles on public affairs and national and international news, which were gradually replaced by fashion and clothing. But a number of periodicals for women living in cities and confined to the domestic domain soon came to light and rapidly reached a mass distribution. What these magazines bolstered now was an ideal of femininity that fit with the new arrangement of gender roles: the model of respectable wife who did not work outside the home and was financially supported by a bread-winning husband was replaced by the middle-class woman occupied with supervising the running of the [Page 600]home and the education of her children. Women's function became identified with being the retreat for the master of the household, and women's magazines both reflected and reproduced this ideal by praising so-called feminine domestic virtues. Clothes and home decor became the sign of both a husband's status and a woman's own accomplishments. According to many feminist accounts, this ideology contributed to gender inequalities in and out of the domestic sphere, as it legitimated the organization of the family in capitalist societies and reproduced women's economic dependence on men.

One of the best-known criticisms of magazine's ideology as reinforcing women's oppression is Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In this classic text, Friedan examines women's magazines from before and after World War II. She notes that, even if devoted to traditional concerns as beauty and love, women's magazines in the 1930s presented an incipient feminism in stories featuring confident and independent heroines involved in careers, encouraging women as citizens to participate in local politics, and advocating social facilities. These topics were replaced in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s by the ideal of a woman whose only ambitions were marriage and motherhood. So the New Woman was substituted by the Happy Housewife Heroine and, in Friedan's account, readers were socialized to see the world according to these new priorities. Magazines' success is commonly recognized as their ability to convincingly present advice on all aspects of domestic life in an entertaining way, but if these magazines have the power to keep women within their home, Friedan says, they cannot prevent the good housekeepers from feeling nothingness and from asking the silent question, “Is that all there is?”

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