Still Reading Women's Magazines: Reconsidering the Tradition a Half Century after The Feminine Mystique

Abstract

Among America's most popular media, women's magazines have long received widespread critique—both inside and outside academia, and not least from women themselves. Since the 1960s, critical discussion has fallen into three basic camps. This article maps those perspectives, and elucidates a fourth position, which theorizes the eclectic nature of the American women's magazine as a hallmark of the form and keynote of its social identity from the very start of the tradition. Seeing the women's magazine as a magazine, a miscellany, this article demonstrates the ways the inherent dynamics of the form have offered a wider range of gender discourse and reader opportunities throughout its history than many previous analyses have allowed. The article offers afresh and potentially generative vision of the form in American history, while it also helps explain the ongoing vitality of both the multiple strains of critique and of avid audiences, despite dramatic changes in media options and middle-class women's lives over the past half-century.