Women in Magazines

Research, Representation, Production and Consumption

Rachel Ritchie, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, S. Jay Kleinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317584018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Women have been important contributors to and readers of magazines since the development of the periodical press in the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, millions of women read the weeklies and monthlies that focused on supposedly "feminine concerns" of the home, family and appearance. In the decades that followed, feminist scholars criticized such publications as at best conservative and at worst regressive in their treatment of gender norms and ideals. However, this perspective obscures the heterogeneity of the magazine industry itself and women's experiences of it, both as readers and as journalists. This collection explores such diversity, highlighting the differing and at times contradictory images and understandings of women in a range of magazines and women's contributions to magazines in a number of contexts from late nineteenth century publications to twenty-first century titles in Britain, North America, continental Europe and Australia.

Part I

Thinking About Women’s Magazines

1 Fragmentation and Inclusivity

Methods for Working with Girls’ and Women’s Magazines

Penny Tinkler

We currently have a fragmented picture of how to address historical questions using girls’ and women’s magazines. Though much has been written about the history of these papers—their production, content, readers/consumers—how researchers work with them is rarely tackled directly and in detail in historical studies. Magazine research methods are typically embedded in discussions of findings and they have to be teased out by the interested reader. This chapter aims to counter this tendency and encourage greater reflection on, and more overt discussion of, our research practices.

Magazine methods typically involve working around magazines and working with them. In this chapter I focus on working with magazines, but ways of working around them are also relevant. Working around magazines embraces the processes of producing them, including the roles of publishers, editors, advertisers, illustrators, designers and so on, as well as the practices of consumption and reading, including what sense people make of magazines. The production and consumption of magazines can be a focus in themselves, but they are also elements of contextual research. Contextual research includes the broader socio-economic, political and cultural contexts and, depending on research questions, the study of potential and actual readers and of editors and publishers. It bridges working around magazines and working with them. Contextual research is an important element in the magazine researcher’s toolkit, and it informs the discussion of methods for working with magazines that are the focus of this chapter.

It is not just historians who work with girls’ and women’s magazines; these periodicals also attract attention from scholars in media and cultural studies, sociology and psychology.¹ In general, historical approaches tend to be distinctive from those of other social science disciplines. Whereas historians are typically attentive to temporally specific social and cultural contexts, other social scientists usually study the present and assume context or address it in general terms. The latter also tend to work with magazines to identify dominant meanings by tracing patterns and trends (using, for example, quantitative content analysis, thematic and discourse studies), often relating these to broader discourses. Sometimes they study the mechanisms through which magazines construct meaning (using semiotic analysis, for instance). Historians draw on social science insights into how meanings are constructed in print media, and they often identify and explore key themes in magazines, but typically they are also interested in particularities.

Girls’ and women’s magazines are complex cultural products. They are part of the periodical industry and designed in relation to one another.² Their content is diverse in format and incorporates different contributors. They are the product of negotiation, typically between publishers, editors, advertisers and readers. Their pages harbour diversity, inconsistency, contradiction and tension.³ For all these reasons it is helpful to have a methodology for working with magazines that is inclusive rather than fragmentary.

An inclusive research strategy is also important because researchers are often tempted to isolate a title from the field of periodicals within which it has been shaped and encountered or to focus on parts of magazines. The latter is particularly likely where historians dip into magazines for examples to bolster or illustrate an argument; this ‘cherry picking’ produces a decontextualised and often skewed impression of how particular topics are represented in magazines. But even where magazines are the focus of study, it is easy to lose sight—often quite literally—of their complexity and of how visual, textual and material features work together. This can result from our choice of methods and analytic strategies, for example, a preoccupation with textual features and the marginalisation of visual elements or a focus on tracing key themes across several issues. Fragmentation also arises from practical constraints. Historians are lucky if they have their own copies of magazines. Often we rely on a combination of notes and photocopies or scans made from archival volumes of magazines. Digitisation is expanding access to women’s magazines but this also contributes to fragmentation in two main ways. First, search facilities encourage a decontextualised selection of magazine extracts. Second, digitisation transforms a three-dimensional object—a magazine—into a two-dimensional image, thereby creating a disjuncture between what we are researching and the version of it that we can work with. The digitisation process reinforces a preoccupation with the visual and obscures the material and tactile aspects of what it means to read a magazine.⁴

In this chapter I present two ways of working inclusively with magazines and address each in turn: first, mapping the field of periodical publishing in which individual titles are located; second, adopting a holistic approach to magazine content.

Mapping Periodical Provision

There are two dimensions to mapping periodical provision: a lateral dimension and a longitudinal one. The lateral dimension is the range of magazines published for a particular constituency at a specific point in time, whilst the longitudinal one considers the forerunners and successors of the magazines that are the focus of the research. I start by explaining why lateral mapping is important and how to do it. Lateral mapping can be particularly useful for exploring the construction of difference, and I demonstrate this with reference to the meaning and significance of age in British magazines for girls and young women in the period 1920–40. Following this I discuss the significance of longitudinal mapping and use the example of mid-twentieth century provision for ‘teenagers’ to illustrate how this technique can be illuminating of social and cultural change.

Lateral Mapping

Lateral mapping is an important aspect of magazine research. It prompts questions about how publishers and editors view girls and women: who do they think wants a magazine? What kind of content do they think these intended readers want or need and why? Who is not provided for and why? How are groups of readers differentiated from one another and on what basis? These questions are important because popular magazines help construct particular versions of what it means to be a girl or woman, and these constructions contribute to wider discourses on girlhood and womanhood. Lateral mapping is also helpful for thinking about readers. Familiarity with the range of magazines on sale at a particular historical juncture sheds light on aspects of readers’ experiences, specifically what options girls and women were presented with and what can be learnt from their consumer choices. In practical terms, thinking about provision is important for contextualising individual titles and for evaluating the significance of what is included in a particular magazine or group of titles.

It is often possible to use secondary sources to map a field and to locate individual papers or clusters of them within this broader terrain. It is, however, difficult to appreciate the look, content and feel of different magazines from second-hand written descriptions and visual fragments. Moreover, if we rely only on academic accounts of magazines, it is hard to appreciate the choices readers made when they selected one magazine in preference to another and the experiences that different magazines offered them. For all these reasons it can be productive to see for ourselves the range of girls’/women’s magazines published in a particular period. Sometimes research necessitates a detailed study of a range of magazines, but often a scan of provision is sufficient. Four practices are key to scanning provision: first, identification of a paper’s intended reader using its title, cover image and manner of address; second, description of the magazine’s contents, particularly the proportion of space and emphasis given to fiction, articles, fashion, personal and consumer guidance, advertising and editorials; third, assessment of the use in magazines of visual material (illustrations, photographs) and colour; fourth, noting how often a magazine was published, its size and cost.

Lateral mapping of provision for girls and young women in the period 1920–40 reveals how publishers constructed a market of ‘girl readers’.⁵ It contributes to understanding the meaning and significance of age, cross-cut by gender, in a period characterised by increased attention to young people and attempts to organise, regulate and protect them.⁶ By 1920, most publishers in Britain had segmented the ‘girl’ market and acknowledged two categories of readers/consumers—the schoolgirl and the working girl. This differentiation was apparent from magazine content, titles and the figures that appeared on magazine covers. Schoolgirl papers generally targeted readers aged ten to fourteen or fifteen years, although a few magazines for mainly middle-class readers, such as the Girl’s Own Paper, also addressed older schoolgirls.⁷ School fiction and schoolgirl heroines reinforced the notion of a schoolgirl identity; the emphasis was on fun, girlfriends and, in some papers, also hobbies, sports and other leisure activities.

Working girls’ papers targeted young women aged fifteen to twenty years. Readers were assumed to have traded full-time schooling for paid employment, to have grown out of tomboyish romps and to have replaced girlfriends with boyfriends. Paid work was presented in the editorials, features and fiction as key to the reader’s identity. The working girl was expected to aspire to marriage and motherhood, but this was not presented as her current reality (though there were occasional features on wives). These magazines were differentiated by the intended reader’s type of employment and spending power, which correlated crudely with social class. Weekly ‘millgirl’ papers targeted working-class girls in mills, factories and domestic service, while weekly business girls’ papers addressed upper-working-class and lower-middle-class young women—‘modern girls’—in sales and clerical work. The monthly Miss Modern (1930–40) targeted middle-class young women with a fairly high degree of disposable income working in retail and clerical work, also the lower professions.

The process of lateral mapping reveals the principles underlying inter-war provision for young women, namely that reader identities were constructed along two axes that gave meaning to age: occupation (school, paid work) and the ‘heterosexual career’.⁸ The ‘heterosexual career’ was informed by understandings of adolescent development, principally whether girls were deemed to be too young to be interested in boys or at an age where this interest was expected to be paramount as a prelude to marriage and motherhood. The heterosexual career shaped all aspects of magazine provision explicitly or implicitly; it not only determined what was represented, but also how. Although the category of ‘girls’ embraced a diversity of experience, ‘girls’ were clearly differentiated from ‘women’ by the fact that they were usually assumed to be unmarried, even if on the brink of marriage.

Lateral mapping also reveals the instability of a commercial identity for young wage-earning women in the inter-war years. This is evidenced by the amalgamation of most of the weekly working girls’ papers into women’s romance magazines. These amalgamations were a rationalisation exercise, but they also signal that publishers did not regard the identities of young wage-earning women as particularly distinctive pre-1940. Although the reader’s status as a paid worker was distinct from that of the wife and mother who typically did not engage in full-time paid work, her perceived preoccupation with romance and heterosexual fulfilment through marriage was seen to overlap sufficiently with that of older and married women so that a separate magazine was not deemed essential. The middle-class monthly, Miss Modern, was an exception. Launched in 1930, Miss Modern folded in 1940 seemingly only because of paper shortages caused by the Second World War. It is tempting to conclude that, unlike the papers that relied on working-class readers, Miss Modern did target a group of readers who wanted a youth-oriented magazine and who could afford to pay for it. Moreover, the paper’s success in securing advertising revenue suggests that readers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I Thinking About Women’s Magazines
• Part II Ideals of Femininity and Negotiating Gender Norms
• Part III Women, Magazines and Employment
• Part IV Young Women in Magazines
• Part V Women’s Bodies from Second Wave Feminism to the Twenty-First Century
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index