Magazines, Women's

MAGAZINES, WOMEN'S

MAGAZINES, WOMEN'S. Within days of each other in 1741 the first two indigenous magazines were published in the American colonies. Largely aimed at men and at establishing a reputable product in the face of British imports, these and subsequent American magazines focused from the start on social life, politics, manners, and what might seem an unlikely topic, women. Article after article debated women's roles in and outside the home, eventually tying together notions of loyalty, morality, and family with larger political ideals of citizenship and then nation. In the post revolutionary period, periodicals aimed directly at women emerged. The best known of these was the Lady's Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, founded in Philadelphia in 1792. Primarily literary, the Lady's Magazine contained no information about what later came to distinguish women's magazines, the topic of household work. The magazine's most notable feature in fact was a nine-page tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was also first published in 1792.

By 1830 over forty women's magazines, all short-lived, had appeared. Unlike men's magazines, women's magazines paid little attention to current events and focused instead on fashion, beauty, and fiction. They demonstrated little editorial coherence but provided an important outlet for women writers and editors, paving the way for mass publications aimed at women. Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous remark about the "damned mob of scribbling women" who wrote for these publications illustrates both the public presence of women writers and the debates they engendered about magazines as popular discourse.

The most successful of the early women's magazines, Godey's Lady's Book, stated in its first issue that it was dedicated to "female improvement." Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the magazine from 1837 to 1877, used the pages of Godey's to promote her causes, chief among them women's education. The magazine was not overtly political, however. Hale managed to interweave discussions of women's issues with a great deal of sentimental and romantic fiction and poetry. She never challenged nineteenth-century notions of women's place, viewing women's domestic roles and their education as entirely compatible. Godey's largely avoided politics, carrying only a brief mention of the suffrage convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. It even failed to comment on the Civil War throughout its duration.

Godey's Lady's Book laid the foundation for the "big six" women's magazines that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Three of these publications—Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, and Good Housekeeping —started as women's pages of popular periodicals or as publications directed at the home. The Ladies' Home Journal, for example, began as "Women and Home," a column in the Tribune and Farmer. The second three of the big six—Delineator, McCall's, and Pictorial Review —started as fashion publications. These six general interest magazines quickly came to share editorial approaches, focusing on women and the home and targeting a white, middle-class audience. They also quickly advanced in circulation. The Ladies' Home Journal, known as the "monthly Bible of the American home," reached a circulation of one million by January 1904.

Circulation rates of women's magazines grew at the same time that advertising increasingly financed magazine production. It was not enough that women purchased the magazines, they had to be convinced to purchase the goods advertised in the pages of those magazines. Magazines depended on advertisers to support their efforts in producing and distributing high-quality products, and advertisers depended on magazines to reach female audiences, who by the early twentieth century were estimated to have purchased over 80 percent of all consumer goods. The relationship between the two industries proved mutually beneficial and allowed magazine and advertising production to become increasingly more sophisticated technically and culturally. In fact women's magazines, using a strategy Mary Ellen Zuckerman identified as "low price, advertising underwriting and targeting of female consumers" (History of Popular Women's Magazines, p. 25), led the magazine field in general and laid the framework for the expansion of this popular medium for the rest of the twentieth century.

The consumer culture promoted in women's magazines presented what Jennifer Scanlon called "a unified and powerful vision of satisfaction not through social change but through consumption" (Inarticulate Longings, p. 230). As a result few of these early women's magazines attempted to or succeeded in breaking out of the pattern of addressing white, middle-class housewives. When they recognized problems in the idealized family, the magazines suggested that women's sphere was that of influence rather than action. At the same time, however, by giving voice to reader complaints and concerns, the magazines revealed women's dissatisfactions as they struggled to live up to cultural standards of womanhood.

Not until the 1960s did more diverse publications aimed at women achieve a secure level of commercial success. One of the most notable of these was Cosmopolitan, a fiction magazine initially published in the early twentieth century then revamped in 1965 to address the needs and desires of single women. The editor, Helen Gurley Brown, and the advertisers who supported the magazine recognized that single women had disposable income and a desire to see themselves, or at least their fantasies, reflected in the pages of a magazine. The Advocate, which started as a weekly in 1967, created the space for a series of publications aimed at gay and then lesbian audiences. Essence, the first mass magazine aimed at African American women, hit the newsstands in 1970 and finally challenged advertisers' reluctance to acknowledge the purchasing power of black Americans. More recent publications like Latina and Moderna followed the lead of Essence and targeted women by race and ethnicity. Another challenger was Ms., which hit the newsstands in 1972. Ms. responded to and helped popularize the women's liberation movement by publishing articles about politics, child care, women's health, lesbian issues, and violence against women. Working Woman, founded in 1976, brought to the fore workplace, financial, and career issues. A magazine targeting older women, Lear's, opened another market but itself came and went. Magazines targeting young women continued to thrive into the twenty-first century primarily because they recognized and exploited the purchasing power of the young. Seventeen boasted to advertisers, for example, that its readers were "branded for life," indicating that brand loyalty is deemed worthy of pursuit in the young, even in a demographically diverse market. Newsstand publications primarily targeted young women, with an emphasis on fitness and beauty.

One development in the world of women's magazines was the "zine," the noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazine produced by do-it-yourself publishers. Zines like Bust, for example, have proliferated, offering more explicit discussions of sexuality and feminist politics than advertising-driven women's magazines. Zines and more mainstream women's magazines increasingly have relied on the Internet as a means of distribution and gauging reader satisfaction. Women's magazines in the twenty-first century have been marketed through a curious combination of appeals to women as individuals, as members of distinct demographically definable groups, and as members of a community of women. For the most part, however, the "essential" woman in the mass magazines has been white, middle-class, and heterosexual. Alternative publications respond and react to the mission and the marketing of those mass "women's" magazines.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Farrell, Amy Erdman. Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Karp, Marcelle, and Debbie Stoller, eds. The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Jennifer Scanlon

See also Advertising ; Ms. Magazine .