Women's Magazines

The first American women's magazine, The Lady's Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, appeared in Philadelphia in 1792. Between 1806 and 1849, women founded and edited 25 women's magazines, and before the Civil War, about 100 national and regional women's periodicals were published. Aimed at the elite, most were modeled on English magazines and focused on fashion, manners, and literature. Godey's Lady's Book (1830–98) is considered the first popular modern women's magazine. In the 1890s, Congress lowered postal rates, printing technology was revolutionized, and manufacturers sought outlets to advertise their mass-produced goods. Consequently, publishers dropped magazine prices, circulation skyrocketed, and middle-class homemakers replaced upper-class “ladies” as the magazines' readers.

Women's magazines have played an important historical role. At a time when few women attended college, they educated readers about a wide range of topics and offered correspondence classes and even scholarships. During the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment (1970–79), some women's magazines pushed for passage of the constitutional amendment. Magazines continue to keep women informed about developments in health, science, the environment, and the economy.

Today most magazine readers are women, and women's magazines are big business. Ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few publishers, for example, Advance Publications (Condé Nast Publications and Fairchild), Meredith Corporation, Hearst Corporation, Hachette Fillipachi Media, and Time Warner Company. There is also foreign ownership—Germany's Gruner + Jahr and Bauer Verlagsgruppe, France's Hachette Fillipachi, and Mexico's Editorial Televisa are examples. This trend goes two ways—U.S. women's magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Glamour, have editions in other countries. Male editors and publishers have dominated many women's magazines for years. For example, Redbook, founded in 1903, didn't have its first woman editor until 1982. In recent decades, the number of female editors and publishers has increased dramatically.