Feminist Magazines

Feminist magazines, which materialized specifically in the 1970s, are associated with a period in history when women and other marginalized groups sought to change how society thought about and constructed personal relationships. Addressing issues concerned with women's personal and social lives, feminist magazines did not undermine popular magazines as much as they provided an additional and alternative space in which issues such as divorce, marital violence, employment, and child rearing could be discussed alongside other concerns. Feminist magazines represent an important intervention in the sphere of media production, allowing many women for the first time to discuss mutual concerns outside the control of popular-media determination.

From the mid-1960s, women's liberation, and then the lesbian and gay liberation movements, heralded the beginnings of a sea change in the understanding of the spheres of the personal and the political in both America and Britain. This turnaround was particularly apparent in the magazine industry that, until 1972, was dominated by popular commercial output. Before the emergence of magazines that directly addressed issues pertaining to feminist and women's liberation, popular magazines for women were produced and consumed in a society still pledged, albeit problematically and precariously, to patriarchy, middle-class norms, and fairly rigid racial and gender-sex divisions.

Much of the cultural incongruity of the late 1960s was brought about by groups involved in civil rights, sexual politics, and gay liberation. These activist spheres challenged traditional values, particularly notions of femininity, masculinity, and hegemonic heterosexuality. The issues being raised by the ongoing sexual-gender politics and activist campaigns, which had previously not been addressed in popular media, became a major feature of the new media output and, more specifically, feminist magazines.

The strained and conflicting dialogues of the 1960s and 1970s between traditional values and identity politics problematized theories of gender, identity, and sexuality. Until the early 1960s, images and representations in popular magazines aimed at women positioned women in relation to the home and domesticity, the family, heterosexual romance, marriage, and beauty. The content of magazines such as Family Circle and Woman's Own reinforced an ideology that promoted consumerism, sexual morality, and traditional gender separations. In magazines published before the early 1960s, conjugal role relations were depicted in ways that secured male rather than female hegemony. Women were expected to stay in the kitchen or do house cleaning, and men were encouraged to find secure careers and much greater degrees of independence. The dominant view depicted men in the public sphere, and the private sphere remained the domain of women.

However, during the 1960s, activist organizations such as the women's liberation movement appealed to women by looking beyond literary, artistic, and academic circles. This allowed feminists and campaigners to mobilize a much broader activist response to the oppressions that women continued to endure in both public and private spaces. One of the most accessible ways of addressing women's concerns about issues [Page 312]such as divorce, domestic violence, employment discrimination, and rape was via magazines.

Spare Rib, first published in Britain in 1972 on the basis of meetings that involved feminists Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, along with Ms., also first published in 1972 and founded in America by Gloria Steinern, were publications that served a feminist agenda. Using a language and formats that attempted to de-objectify women, these magazines nonetheless addressed a broad range of everyday social anxieties. The publications deployed similar formats and editorial features but differed from mainstream commercial output of the time. Cosmopolitan and Nova did not seriously challenge the gendered nature of social structures, and representations of women in popular media ignored feminist critiques. Long-standing magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, although highlighting the importance of mutuality and the sharing of roles, continued to reinforce the gendered nature of women's domestic responsibility within the family. Feminist magazines importantly questioned such output and in doing so, critically questioned received notions of beauty, romance, and domestic life.

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