Australian Women's Weekly Research Articles

How to navigate a pandemic: Competing discourses in The Australian Women's Weekly magazine

As the Covid-19 pandemic caused schools, workplaces, and childcare centres to close, pressures in the home increased. Much of the additional unpaid work required under these conditions was done by women. Most women's magazines at this time urged women to stay positive and develop wellbeing routines to help them flourish. This approach reinforces normative neoliberal subjectivity with its roots in therapeutic culture and the happiness industry. While the focus on self-care may seem empowering, it puts more pressure on women in times of upheaval. Based on a thematic analysis of pandemic-related content in Australia's most popular women's magazine, The Australian Women's Weekly, we identified three key themes: ‘finding the silver lining’, ‘making lifestyle choices’, and ‘recognising hardships and social divides’. While self-responsibilising discourses were prominent, some articles acknowledged the broader structural issues impacting women, revealing a tension between competing discourses.

The Imitation Game: Mock Foods in the Australian Women's Weekly, 1933–82

This article explores the rise and demise of mock food in Australian food culture by analysing recipes drawn from the pages of the Australian Women's Weekly. Mock foods were approximations and substitutions for ‘the real thing’ and were especially popular during the years of austerity and scarcity generated by the Great Depression and World War II. The fluctuating popularity of these foods, including mock chicken and mock cream, reveals the shifting cultural importance of various foodstuffs to the Australian diet. Their appearance also demonstrates the remarkable ability of Australian domestic cooks, especially women, to adopt, adapt and innovate, an important attribute of Australian food culture.

Science and evolving community knowledge and opinion on feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park

Science and evolving community knowledge and opinion on feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park

The Question of the Spotted Muumuu: How the Australian Women's Weekly Manufactured a Vision of the Normative School Mother and Child, 1930s–1980s

This paper examines Australia's history of uniformed schooling as mediated by its leading mass-market magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly. This magazine was a significant cultural agent that served as an authority on everything from fashion to schooling, capitalizing on the matter of school dress by running advertisements for school uniforms, printing articles and letters on school wear, and featuring attractive images of uniformed schoolchildren. This paper argues that the Weekly used this content to provide textual and visual reinforcement for a powerful cultural trope of the proper, desirable, happy, and modern Australian schoolchild as uniformed. In doing so, it represented the normative school mother as working behind the scenes to produce or procure the school uniform as well as to arrange and manage the uniformed child. We contend that the magazine portrayed this work as part of a project to draw the mother into a respectable and ostensibly “Australian” community.

Infant food marketing strategies undermine effective regulation of breast‐milk substitutes: trends in print advertising in Australia, 1950–2010

This study addresses the issue of whether voluntary industry regulation has altered companies' marketing of breast-milk substitutes in Australia since the adoption of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Code on the Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes 1981. Print advertisements marketing breast-milk substitutes were systematically sampled from the Australian Women's Weekly (AWW) magazine and the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) for the 61 years from 1950 to 2010. Breast-milk substitute advertising in both the MJA and the AWW peaked and began declining before the introduction of the WHO Code in 1981. Although there was almost no infant formula advertising in AWW after 1975-79, other breast-milk substitute advertising has been increasing since 1992, in particular for baby food, toddler formula and food and brand promotion. Companies have adopted strategies to minimise the effects of the Code on sales and profit in Australia, including increasing toddler formula and food advertisements, increasing brand promotion to the public, and complying with more limited voluntary regulatory arrangements. Comprehensive regulation is urgently required to address changed marketing practices if it is to protect breastfeeding in Australia.

The sting in the tail: antiseptics and the neuraxis revisited

Reference 3 in this paper 1 should read as follows: Sheather M. My epidural hell. Australian Women's Weekly March 30, 2011: 97–102. http://aww.ninemsn.com.au/news/inthemag/8230075/my-epidural-hell (accessed 13/09/2012).

Eating it too: 'The icing on the (birthday) cake'

Icing is not essential to the enjoyment of cakes, but it is part of the pleasure cakes offer and, especially when it comes to celebratory cakes, that pleasure can be more aesthetic than gustatory. The phrase 'the icing on the cake' refers to the finishing touch, the superfluous and even the frivolous: it connotes the ephemeral, the trivial and the feminine. In the case of the celebratory cake, however, it is all about the icing. The history of confectionery is mostly identified with the devaluation of sugar and its shift from the masculine/public sphere to the feminine/private sphere, but wedding cakes and children's birthday cakes descend from the elaborate sugar sculptures that were festive emblems of rank on the banquet tables of medieval courts. This article examines The Australian Women's Weekly (AWW) Children's Birthday Cake Book, which uses common confectionery as cake decoration. Sugar was once a magical substance in an ordinary world and, by endowing cakes with an appeal similar to that of toys, these AWW cakes excite visual pleasure and create childhood memories through artistry and spectacle. As confectionery historian Laura Mason explains, 'Sugar is fantasy land'.

The Flip Side: Women on the Redex Around Australia Reliability trials of the 1950s

In August 1953 almost 200 cars set off from the Sydney Showgrounds in what popular motoring histories have called the biggest, toughest, most ambitious, demanding, 'no-holds-barred' race, which 'caught the public imagination' and 'fuelled the nation with excitement'.1 It was the first Redex Around Australia Reliability Trial and organisers claimed it would be more testing than the famous Monte Carlo Rally through Europe and was the longest and most challenging motoring event since the New York-to-Paris race of 1908.2 That 1953 field circuited the eastern half of the continent, travelling north via Brisbane, Mt Isa and Darwin, passing through Alice Springs to Adelaide and returning to the start point in Sydney via Melbourne. Two Redex trials followed, in 1954 and 1955, and each was longer and more demanding than the one before. The last two trials circled the entire continent to include Western Australia, returning to Sydney via Perth and the Nullarbor Plain.3 In an earlier article, I examined those Redex trials as a popular celebration of coming industrialisation and material prosperity, which articulated a range of possibilities for what it meant to be Australian in that postwar era. The trials offered a performative affirmation of the capacity of settler Australians to fully possess the continent through the power of modern technologies and provided a locus for popular debate about some of the meanings of Australian modernisation in those postwar years.4 This article focuses more closely on one element ofthat larger national conversation about how a modern automobile culture would find a particularly Australian expression by exploring women's engagements with the Redex trials. Women's unexpected and enthusiastic participation in the trials, their tremendous popularity with spectators, as well as their high profile in media reports, provide new perspectives on the ways that automobiles were enmeshed in contestations over masculinity and femininity in Australia at that historical moment. An around-Australia car race had been mooted since the 1930s, particularly to celebrate the sesquicentenary of British settlement in 1938, but it was not until 1953 that anything as ambitious was attempted.5 By then it was an idea whose time had arrived. As soon as the first trial was announced, the enthusiastic response from the public and the broad range of people who registered to enter the events caught even the organisers quite by surprise. That intense national fervour for around-Australia races was brief. By the end of the third trial, public interest in the events was evaporating and subsequent around-Australia reliability trials, such as the Ampol Trial of 1956 or the Mobilgas trials that followed, attracted much less national attention, barely registering beyond a circle of dedicated motorsport enthusiasts.6 For those three years, however, the Redex trials attracted extensive press coverage, as a burgeoning media network operating across multiple modes vied to bring stories and images to audiences across the country. Daily newspapers, motoring magazines, cinema newsreels, women's magazines such as the Australian Women's Weekly, popular publications such as Pix and Australasian Post, as well as nearreal-time reporting via hundreds of radio stations across Australia, reported in minute detail on the convoys of cars moving around the continent. Some media outlets, such as Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Brisbane's TheCourier-Mail and the Women's Weekly, entered their own crews, while others followed the field in airplanes.7 Ken Hall of the Australian newsreel company Cinesound pre-sold film footage to trial entrants to help finance the documentaries he later distributed to national and international audiences.8 Media images showed battered cars covered in advertising slogans as dots on a vast landscape. Film footage featured cars careering around corners on two wheels, with funnels of dust suspended behind them, or surging across swollen creek beds, spectators standing by ready to push them through if they stalled. …

Pests and Home-Making: Depictions of Pests in Homemaker Magazines

ABSTRACTDespite their ubiquity and significant impact within the house-as-home, pests have largely been absent from discussions of home-making. This article addresses this absence by drawing on depictions of pests in four popular Australian homemaker magazines—Australian Women's Weekly, Australian House & Garden and Australian Home Beautiful in the periods 1951–5, 1971–5, and 2001–5, as well as Better Homes & Gardens 2001–5. In a first analysis of this material, pests appear as nonhuman animals that disrupt people's experiences of home. Border narratives that depict home as an inappropriate abode for pests are significant in these discussions. However, an alternate view of pests emerges through further analysis. In this view, pests become part of home and shape human experiences of the space. Home appears here as an active and dynamic space that is lived in multiple and fractured ways that exceed its intentioned human design. This view acknowledges the more-than-human dimensions of home-making, pointing to home as an imbrication of human and nonhuman actors, including pests, home furnishings, and house structures.

MY OTHER, MY SELF

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.

How much visual power can a magazine take?

Visual power is the degree of visual stimulus emanating from a given design; the higher the stimulus, the greater the degree for attracting attention. First described by Baird in 1993, it was used as a method for attributing degrees of design aesthetic in print materials. The visual grammar used by different magazine publications can be ascribed differing levels of visual power. Magazines with homogeneous age group readerships tend to use greater values of visual power than those with wider age group readerships. This pilot case study takes a historical snapshot of the development of visual grammar and illustrates its relationship. Two magazines, The Australian Women's Weekly and The Face, are used for a more detailed study on 16 years of variations in arousal potential, hedonic tone and primary cognition associated with the application of visual power in visual grammar.

The Paradox in Ageing Well: Stories of older women in the Australian Women's Weekly

The Paradox in Ageing Well: Stories of older women in the Australian Women's Weekly

The 'Australian Woman' and her Migrant Others in the Postwar Australian Women's Weekly

(2000). The 'Australian Woman' and her Migrant Others in the Postwar Australian Women's Weekly. Continuum: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 121-132.

TheAustralian Women's Weekly1946–1971: A textual and historical analysis

The<i>Australian Women's Weekly</i>1946–1971: A textual and historical analysis

Indexing The Australian Women's Weekly

The Women's Studies Unit at Flinders University is undertaking a thematic and textual analysis of the Australian Women's Weekly over the period 1946–71. Preparatory to this task they have undertaken the creation of a detailed data base index of the Weekly for six years through this period. Because the Weekly covers the domestic sphere of life alongside the public, indexing it has created special demands on a thesaurus. This article discusses the peculiarities of indexing a women's magazine and the issues raised in choosing a thesaurus to act as an authority for descriptors. Persons interested in purchasing a copy of the index when it becomes available should contact the Women's Studies Unit at Flinders University.