The New Women's Magazines: It's the Same Old Story

Abstract

In the past year there has been a spate of new women's magazines, directed at consumers of popular culture, and prompted partly by the notion that the women's liberation movement has created a new female audience an audience left behind by Journal (which has just recently dropped the Ladies' Home from the name and now calls itself the Journal), Redbook, Family Circle, and McCall's, among others. These classics have been geared to the housewife or homemaker, and although they are starting to expand their approach to include the problems of the working woman, there are still the ads for new floor wax, recipes for a new vegetable sauce which will give those carrots zing, tips for renovating the unused basement, for making an exciting meal from yesterday's turkey dinner, and for updating last year's now passe hemlines. They have a formula and the formula remains popular: throw in a few new recipes, some home decorating ideas with glossy color pictures, new hairstyles with directions on how to do them, mix with a short story, some true-life testimony ( 'My husband was getting tired of me and I didn't know it': One woman's response to a failing marriage), and some medical advice. Another type of pre-feminist classic is the fashion magazine, magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue which are dedicated almost exclusively to appearance, with some friendly and chatty just-we-girls advice on How to Make the Most of the New You. In contrast, the new women's magazines as a genre are not quite so simple to classify. They appear to appeal to a middle ground, something in between the fashion model and the homemaker. Now we have New Woman, Working Woman magazines tailored for popular consumption, for Women Today, which stress the Self, the independent woman who is more than someone else's appendage. [1] They claim to be geared to women who have been affected by the feminist movement and who are uncomfortable with just recipes and fashion tips; women who want and need more from a magazine than home decorating hints, fitness exercises, and new, flattering hairstyles. But though the titles of these magazines would indicate that they are aimed at the liberated woman, the magazines themselves have more in common with Cosmopolitan and Redbook than they do with Ms. (which for all its concessions to the popular market, at least, thank God, does not tell you how to flatten your tummy, or find a man who will be your slave). Contrary to their titles, the new women's magazines are not anything Their concerns are more with physical appearance than social equity; with individual adaptation rather than social action and change. The ideology is not much different from that of Cosmopolitan: the February, 1979 issue of New Woman (which boasts a readership of four million) features articles on Do You Have a Good Marriage? That Special Quality that Keeps a Man Devoted for Decades, Can You Make Him Love You Forever? Do You Have Any of These 11 Symptoms of Sexual Frustration? It is the same old line, peddled under a new cover, pretending to deliver something new. Of all the new women's magazines, Self is the most ambitious in many ways, and for that reason it is the most disappointing. In the introductory note from the editor, we are told that, All over the world women are exercising, running, hiking, dieting, meditating, exploring their way to fitness physical, emotional, sexual, mental. And obviously Self is going to cash in on that phenomenon. Its editorial content an inter-