1st Edition

Women in Magazines Research, Representation, Production and Consumption

    266 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    276 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Introduction  Rachel Ritchie, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips and S. Jay Kleinberg  Part I: Thinking About Women’s Magazines  1. Fragmentation and Inclusivity: Methods for Working with Girls’ and Women’s Magazines  Penny Tinkler  2. Landscape for a Good Woman’s Weekly: Finding Magazines in Post-War British History and Culture  Tracey Loughran  Part II: Ideals of Femininity and Negotiating Gender Norms  3. Gender, Reproduction and the Fight for Free Love in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press  Sarah Jones  4. Inter-War Czech Women's Magazines: Constructing Gender, Consumer Culture and Identity in Central Europe  Karla Huebner  5. Make Any Occasion a Special Event: Hospitality, Domesticity and Female Cordial Consumption in Magazine Advertising, 1950-1969  Rochelle Pereira-Alvares  6. Righting Women in the 1960s: Gender, Power and Conservatism in the Pages of The New Guard  Sinead McEneaney  Part III: Women, Magazines and Employment  7. Getting a Living, Getting a Life: Leonora Eyles, Employment and Agony, 1925-1930  Fiona Hackney  8. "Corresponding with Men": Exploring the Significance of Constance Maynard’s Magazine Writing, 1913-1920  Gretchen Galbraith  9. The Married Woman Worker in Chatelaine Magazine, 1948-1964  Helen Glew  10. Nanny Knows Best?: Tensions in Nanny Employment in Early and Mid-Twentieth-Century British Childcare Magazines  Katherine Holden  Part IV: Young Women in Magazines  11. The American Girl: Ideas of Nationalism and Sexuality as Promoted in the Ladies’ Home Journal during the Early Twentieth Century  Cheyanne Cortez  12. A Taste of Honey: Get-Ahead Femininity in 1960s Britain  Fan Carter  Part V: Women’s Bodies from Second Wave Feminism to the Twenty-First Century  13. Popular Feminism and the Second Wave: Women’s Liberation, Sexual Liberation and Cleo Magazine  Megan Le Masurier  14. How Ladies’ Home Journal Covered Second Wave Health, 1969-1975  Amanda Hinnant  15. Beauty Trade and the Rise of American Black Hair Magazines  Carina Spaulding

    Biography

    Rachel Ritchie is an Associate Research Fellow at Brunel University London.

    Sue Hawkins teaches 19th-century British social history at Kingston University London.

    Nicola Phillips is a Gender Historian and Co-Director of the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and the MA in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

    S. Jay Kleinberg is a Professor Emerita at Brunel University London and Chair of the Society for the History of Women in the Americas.

    "A part of Routledge’s Research in Gender and History series, Women in Magazines is “not simply about women’s magazines” but rather about “the position of women in magazines” (p. 1). An anthology of women’s depictions in—as well as contributions to— magazines, the volume contains essential readings for media and feminist scholars as well as
    historians. In the classroom, the collection could provide fodder for discussions in upperlevel undergraduate or graduate level courses in magazine media, journalism, and women and gender studies. Individual chapters would also be at home as required reading for a variety of history courses in either upper-level undergraduate or graduate programs."

    - Catherine Staub, Drake University