Popular Feminism and the Second Wave: Women’s Liberation, Sexual Liberation and Cleo Magazine

Abstract

Cleo magazine was launched in Australia in November 1972. It was a mainstream magazine, much like American and British Cosmopolitan, and vied for a similar demographic of younger women open to new ideas about gender equality and sexual freedom. Cleo, however, was more overtly committed to engaging with ideas of women’s liberation than Cosmopolitan and was produced for a specifically Australian readership. Within the mainstream of the Australian magazine landscape at the time, Cleo was extraordinary in its departure from the general focus of women’s magazines on homes, husbands, children, recipes, royalty and the accoutrements of a traditional femininity.1 The scant academic work that has been done on Australian magazines of the period of the second wave (late 1960s to early 1980s) gives no indication of Cleo’s feminist enthusiasm. Australian feminists in the 1970s took their cue from Betty Friedan’s excoriating analysis of women’s magazines as the primary force that kept women trapped inside the home.2 Like their contemporaries in Britain and America, feminists and scholars either ignored or disparaged women’s magazines of this period. The mainly British tradition of work that does refer back to 1970s magazines, such as the incipiently global title Cosmopolitan, recycled the conclusions of earlier feminists about their tokenistic, ‘fake’ feminism.3 Angela McRobbie, for example, confidently generalised that women’s magazines in the 1970s were full of ‘deep conservatism’ in terms of feminism.4 But deep conservatism was not in evidence in Cleo. As Jennifer Scanlon also concluded in her recent study of Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of US Cosmopolitan, there was indeed an engagement with the idea of women’s liberation (and sexual liberation) in this influential magazine in the 1970s.5