Words that matter: Lexical choice and gender ideologies in women's magazines

Abstract

This article reports on a lexical study of four US women's magazines ( Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Working Woman and Ms.). Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, I explore the connections between the vocabulary and the dominant gender ideology of each magazine. I argue that magazines are powerful instruments in maintaining and challenging gender ideologies in US society, and I propose that the ideological weight of each magazine is partly sustained by particular uses of the lexicon. Using the WordSmith Tools program, I first study the most frequent and relevant vocabulary of each magazine and then use this information to examine the use of certain lexical items in the specific contexts where they appear. Results show that the most frequent and relevant vocabulary of each magazine is not exclusively related to topicality but appears distributed across texts, thus functioning as an ideological resource for the description and evaluation of people and situations. The analysis also shows that certain words (e.g., “woman”, “man”, or “work”), despite being very frequent in all four magazines, are used in ways that reveal the magazines’ position towards women and femininity, especially regarding their emphasis on gender as an individual or a social issue.