MY OTHER, MY SELF

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For work that begins to explore the relationship between feminism and popular culture, see also Gamman Gamman , Lorraine , and Margaret Marshment 1988 . The female gaze . London : Women's Press . [Google Scholar] and Marshment's edited collection The Female Gaze (1988). 2. Disturbingly, perhaps, Hermes entertains the possibility that the way magazines are read in the unfocused flurry of everyday life renders them ‘virtually meaningless’. That potentially nihilistic insight for media and cultural studies’ concern with the reception of popular texts has been left hanging on the page. 3. There is no archive of Cleo letters beyond those that were published. Popular magazines rarely consider their own future historical value in the immediacy of deadlines and the continual present of magazine publishing. Nor would the publishing company, Australian Consolidated Press, allow me access to whatever documents may have been kept relating to Cleo. This lack of co-operation with researchers is one that Bridget Griffin-Foley also met when writing The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (1999). 4. Issues of authenticity, selection and editing letters in magazines demand an article in their own right. Given the popular mythology that readers’ letters to magazines are invented by staff writers, it is probably worth stressing here that this is simply not the case with Cleo and with many (if not all) magazines. I have yet to interview Ita Buttrose and other staff formally, but informal conversation indicates a respect for the editorial function of the letters page to create a public forum, to increase magazine loyalty and ‘brand’ identification, and to allow readers to feel ownership and inclusion in ‘their’ magazine. There is a principle of trust involved with publishing readers’ letters, and it is one that women's magazines like Cleo took seriously. If readers’ letters were written in-house, and if that practice leaked into the public domain, the trust between readers and their magazine would be broken. 5. Here I use the broader definition of consciousness-raising as defined by Meryl Altman: ‘… a belief in the liberating potential of speaking openly about women's lives, starting with one's own and moving outward to connect with others’ (Altman 2003 Altman , Meryl. 2003 . Beyond trashiness: The sexual language of 1970s feminist fiction . Journal of International Women's Studies 4 ( 2 ): 1 – 19 . Available from http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/April03/Altman.pdf [cited 10 February 2007] . [Google Scholar], 2). 6. The Australian Women's Weekly was the most-read magazine, reaching 34.1 per cent of Australians. Cosmopolitan, Cleo's most direct niche competitor, and at that point a little over a year old in Australia, was read by 4.9 per cent. 7. Dr Beverly Raphael was Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Sydney in 1975. After an illustrious career in the mental health service sector, she now holds many professorial appointments at a number of Australian universities. 8. Edna Ryan was involved at this time in the Industrial Action group of WEL. It was her submission to the Arbitration Commission in 1974 that succeeded in removing the legal concept of the male family wage, replacing it with the adult minimum wage. 9. By 1976, 36 per cent of the Australian workforce was female and, of that number, 64 per cent were married women (Matthews 1984 Matthews , Jill Julius. 1984 . Good and mad women. The historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia . North Sydney : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar], 54). 10. It is pointed that Dasey does not identify as a feminist in her editorial letter, but as part of ‘the women's movement’, a by-word in Cleo for the less militant, more ‘respectably’ mainstream manifestation of women's liberation. 11. There is no space here to explore the mainstreaming of sexual liberation in Cleo and its contentious relationship to second-wave feminism, but that too is part of the meaning of popular feminism and part of its trajectory into the present.