Women's Magazines

Women's magazines are periodical publications explicitly addressed to female readers. This kind of press covers a vast range of topics: fashion, beauty, romance, fitness, cooking, childbearing, politics, traveling, and so forth. Social and historical accounts of consumer culture call attention to the role of magazines in shaping and affecting the imagery and lifestyles of women from different social classes, races, ethnicities, ages, geographical regions, and cultural milieus. For at least three centuries, women's magazines have instructed women to choose and consume commodities to make “appropriate” female identity-marking purchases: improving their relationships and their lifestyles; transforming their appearance, especially to please others; and, implicitly, developing a consciousness of their own femininity.

The first publications dealing with women's issues, such as the English Athenian Mercury (1691), Female Tatler (1709), or Lady's Magazine (1770), were addressed to upper-class ladies and advised them on how to organize their leisure time or improve their virtues. They were a mix of literary readings, letters, and articles about personal concerns or issues such as science and medicine. The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed the launching of magazines explicitly aimed at amusing their readers through pleasurable and practical visual elements. Such periodicals contained a limited treatment of public affairs and national and international news but presented fashion and lifestyle topics.

A number of changes in the first decades of the nineteenth century—including improvements in printing technology, new marketing techniques, and advertising, increased literacy among people, and better purchasing power of middle classes—contributed to the rapid rise of women's magazines and their proliferation within diverse socioeconomic milieus. They appeared in almost every city or town large enough to have a printing press, and they soon reached a leading position in the industry. Setting the pattern in the United States for expensive fashion magazines was Harper's Bazar (1867; Harper's Bazaar after 1929), whereas Godey's Ladies Book (1830) soon became one of the most successful fashion magazines of the nineteenth century as an analyzer of middle-class tastes and arbiter of etiquette, home economics, and standards of propriety.

The expansion of manufacturing took the production of goods out of the domestic sphere, and women of the growing urban middle-class were assigned to tasks confined to the private world of home. A clearly gendered division of labor significantly affected the lifestyle of the households: the image of a couple where the wife managed the house and cared for the children and a career-focused husband who was the sole breadwinner gradually became the model for middle-class families and—at least theoretically—for working-class families too. Women's magazines both reflected these changes and contributed to their acknowledgment in women's imaginations, illustrating to their readers all the virtues of the domestic domain. Because of this, in the following century, feminist authors criticized women's magazines, denouncing the gendered division of labor as a way to keep women apart from the public domain and to confirm their economic, social, and cultural dependence on men.

During the twentieth century, magazine publishers continuously modernized their products in terms [Page 1532]of design and packaging to improve their competitive position. Target readerships became ever more fragmented: upper-class magazines chronicling society, the arts, theater, and high fashion; middle-class magazines giving advice on household management, beauty, and fashion; and working-class magazines offering fictions about romantic heroines with impeccable virtues. In the post–World War II period, the women's magazine industry began to use demographic data, ranking women by economic status, age, and marital status, to predict consumption patterns and to segment their readership attitude.

...