Understanding Women's Magazines

Publishing, Markets and Readerships in Late-Twentieth Century Britain

Anna Gough-Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134606238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Understanding Women's Magazines investigates the changing landscape of women's magazines. Anna Gough-Yates focuses on the successes, failures and shifting fortunes of a number of magazines including Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Frank, New Woman and Red and considers the dramatic developments that have taken place in women's magazine publishing in the last two decades.
Understanding Women's Magazines examines the transformation in the production, advertising and marketing practices of women's magazines. Arguing that these changes were driven by political and economic shifts, commercial cultures and the need to get closer to the reader, the book shows how this has led to an increased focus on consumer lifestyles and attempts by publishers to identify and target a 'new woman'.

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UNDERSTANDING WOMEN’S MAGAZINES

How can we ‘understand’ women’s magazines? Previous scholars in this field have offered contrasting accounts of how women’s magazines might be ‘understood’, and how they should be studied. Many have focused on women’s magazines at a textual level, and analysed them for their ideological content. Others have argued that women’s magazines can be understood by exploring the ways in which their readers consume them. A few studies have maintained that women’s magazines are best approached through an analysis of their conditions of production. In this chapter I explore and unpack these various approaches, clarifying exactly what is at stake when we talk about ‘understanding’ women’s magazines.

A survey of existing research both alerts us to some of the complexities involved in the study of women’s magazines and highlights the variety of ways in which the field has been accorded significance within the social sciences. A review of earlier scholarly work also allows the context and concerns of the present study to be mapped out. In outlining the nature and implications of earlier studies, this chapter explores the ways in which women’s magazine research could benefit from a re-evaluation of its methods of cultural analysis. In particular, I argue for an account of women’s magazines that gives close attention to the ways their meanings are produced and circulated at ‘economic’ sites. I am especially concerned with how practitioners in the women’s magazine industry (together with those working in the closely allied fields of advertising and marketing) understand, represent and relate to their product. I explore the ways in which these conditions of existence impact upon the management and organization of the magazine industry, the way they influence the relationships between women’s magazines, advertisers and marketers, and the way they ultimately shape the character of the magazines that appear on the newsagents’ shelves. Rather than being the exclusive province of economic imperatives, therefore, I argue that the business of women’s magazine production should also be seen as a cultural realm. Yes, it is a commercially led, market-oriented industry. But one that depends heavily on social and cultural processes for its effective operation.

As will become evident, while I emphasize issues of methodology in this chapter, I acknowledge that the research model I ultimately adopted for this study has inevitable limitations. The strength of the analysis lies, however, in the attention it gives to the economic and social facets of the business of magazine production – areas almost entirely ignored in previous studies of women’s magazines, where textual analysis has tended to be prioritized over issues of production and industry organization. In doing so, existing scholarship has, I argue, disregarded aspects in the ‘life’ of women’s magazines that are crucially important in the generation and circulation of their meanings. This chapter, therefore, outlines existing work in the field of women’s magazines and explains how my own study of a particularly important moment in their development – the 1980s and 1990s – opens up new and challenging ways for ‘understanding’ these texts’ production, circulation and consumption.

Women’s magazines, feminism and ideology

Studies of women’s magazines have been conducted largely by feminist media scholars. As Joke Hermes (1997: 223) has pointed out, such studies have invariably configured these texts as a ‘problem’ for women. Whilst the work of feminist media critics has diverse disciplinary origins, the majority have argued that the media contribute to the reinforcement of gender differences and inequalities in contemporary societies. From this perspective, media representations are seen as a key site through which oppressive feminine identities are constructed and disseminated. In these terms those working in media production are seen as conspiring in the promotion of both capitalism and patriarchy. Classically, then, feminist critiques of the media industries portray them as ideologically manipulative – and the role of the critic is seen as highlighting and challenging their system of domination.

Such assumptions about the manipulative role of media producers are evident in most studies of women’s magazines. The women’s magazine industry is understood as a monolithic meaning-producer, circulating magazines that contain ‘messages’ and ‘signs’ about the nature of femininity that serve to promote and legitimate dominant interests. This book argues that such accounts of women’s magazines offer, at best, only a partial account of the industry. In particular, I contend that ‘classic’ feminist perspectives tend to neglect the ways in which cultural production involves, as Richard Johnson puts it, ‘raw materials, tools or means of production, and socially-organized forms of human labour’ (1986/7: 99). Many feminist accounts of women’s magazines, I argue, overlook these vital issues. Existing perspectives effectively marginalize the specificities of social, political and economic formations and their impact upon not only women’s magazine production, but also the lived cultures of the magazine producers themselves. Taking the text itself as the key point of analysis, existing scholarship has hitherto ignored the roles of producers in using (and transforming) discursive and ideological elements within the development of women’s magazines.

Early feminist accounts of women’s magazines (and their interpretation of the relationship between the texts and their readers’ self-perception) were concerned with the ways that magazines offered ‘unreal’, ‘untruthful’ or ‘distorted’ images of women. These studies, therefore, called for more ‘positive’ images of women, ones that were more in line with the ethos and ideals of the feminist movement. Betty Friedan (1963) and Tuchman et al. (1978), for example, both offered seminal accounts of women’s magazines that viewed the texts as highly problematic for feminism. From this perspective, women’s magazines were seen as a powerful force for the construction and legitimation of gender inequalities. In these terms, women’s magazines did not simply offer their readers innocent pleasure – they were a key site for the development of a self-identity that undermined women’s essential, ‘real’ feminine identities. Both Friedan and Tuchman presented women’s magazines as pernicious and alienating, as texts that worked to estrange and separate women from both one another and from their ‘true’ selves. The media (and implicitly those involved in their production), therefore, were presented as a ‘problem’ for the women’s movement – a ‘problem’ to which Friedan and Tuchman offered similar solutions. Both authors concluded their studies by advocating the ‘liberation’ of women’s magazine readerships through the ‘enlightening’ force of feminism. And this, they hoped, would ultimately sweep away the women’s magazine in its contemporary (and lamentably patriarchal) form.

The late 1970s saw a shift away from conceiving women’s magazines simply in terms of their ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ images of women. Instead, moving beyond the liberal feminist perspectives advanced by Friedan and Tuchman, many critics found a more sophisticated theoretical model in the work of the neo-Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser (1970). Influenced by Althusser’s challenging reworking of the Marxist notion of ideology, many feminist authors began to suggest that the representations of women prevalently offered in women’s magazines were not simply ‘ideological’ chimera, but had repercussions in women’s lives that were both concrete and material.

The significance of Althusser’s work lies in his insistence that ideology is not just a set of illusory ideas, or a form of mental state or consciousness. Instead, he understands ideology as having material form, existing as something that is carried out by groups and institutions in society. In order for ideology to be effective, Althusser argues, the people living this imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence must engage in rituals and practices. These, he contends, are ideologically inscribed into the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs) of society. These institutions work to form people as subjects of ideology. They also ensure that people place (and understand) themselves in terms of ideological frameworks. Feminist media critics who employed Althusser’s model in their analyses of women’s magazines believed that women would recognize themselves in terms of the ideological frameworks generated within the texts (see Glazer, 1980; Leman, 1980; Winship,

1978). The representations of femininity in women’s magazines, therefore, were seen as ‘naturalizing’ an ideologically charged image of women and their place in society. Consequently, these texts were seen as instruments of domination that contributed to the overall subordination of women’s ‘real’ identities (Hermes, 1997: 223). As with the earlier (liberal feminist) studies, the practices of magazine producers went largely undiscussed within the neo-Althusserian model – the implicit assumption being that the producers were either cunning publishing entrepreneurs or exploited media workers dragooned into the dissemination of dominant ideas and values.

Nevertheless, the strength of this ‘Althusserian’ model of analysis lay in its capacity to move away from the earlier obsession with ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ images of femininity. Instead, greater recognition was given to the place of women’s magazines in the wider universe of cultural politics, and better attention was given to their role in fixing and containing feminine identities. At the same time, however, these approaches were not without their flaws. As subsequent studies observed, the implications of accounts informed by Althusser’s ideas were that women’s magazines were essentially ‘closed’ texts that imprisoned their women readers within a dominant set of ideologies. For some, such an approach offered an overly pessimistic account of readers’ relationships with their magazines, reducing the text to little more than an agent in the service of patriarchal capitalism.

Women’s magazine scholarship and ‘the turn to Gramsci’

By the 1980s a number of feminist authors had begun to develop textually based approaches to women’s magazines that addressed some of the shortcomings of the earlier scholarship. Influential in this respect was the work of the Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1971). Gramsci’s notions of ‘civil society’ and the production of hegemony were of particular interest. For many theorists they allowed women’s magazines to be conceived of as an arena of political contest rather than simply a site of ideological manipulation. Generally, Gramsci conceives of hegemony as a situation in which a class or class faction is able to secure a moral, cultural, intellectual (and thereby political) leadership in society through an ongoing process of ideological struggle and compromise. Hegemony, therefore, is not a ‘given’. Rather, it is a process requiring strategies of accommodation in which a degree of ‘space’ is accorded to oppositional ideas and interests. Hence hegemony is understood as a ‘compromise equilibrium’ – though it is an equilibrium that ultimately works to articulate the interests of subordinate groups to those of the dominant (Gramsci, 1971: 161). According to Gramsci, this is achieved in the realm of what he calls ‘civil society’. This is an aggregation of social institutions that includes trade unions, religious organizations, the media and all the other organizations that are formed outside the parameters of the more coercive state-funded organizations and bureaucracies. In employing a

Gramscian framework, therefore, women’s magazines could be conceived as constituent in the play of dominant and subordinate interests that took place within the realm of ‘civil society’. As such, magazines were seen as a site where women’s oppression was debated and negotiated, rather than merely reinforced.

Sandra Hebron’s study of Jackie and Woman’s Own (1983) was one of the first to adopt this approach. Hebron argued that whilst ideology played a crucial role in maintaining women’s subordinate position in society, women’s magazines constituted a site where marked elements of ideological negotiation were discernible. Janice Winship took a similar line. Winship’s influential work on the changing contours of the British women’s magazine market from the 1950s to the 1980s attempted to pursue the full implications of Gramscian theory. In her key study, Inside Women’s Magazines (1987), Winship examined the shifting content of women’s magazines in relation to wider changes in the social position of women in modern Britain.¹ From the late 1960s, Winship argued, the rise of the women’s movement brought with it a growth in magazine coverage of political issues, including those previously dismissed as unacceptably ‘feminist’ (Winship, 1987: 92). She asserted, however, that women’s magazines still adopted a characteristically ‘pragmatic’ approach to such issues. So, while the magazines appeared to offer solutions to women’s socio-economic oppression, this was essentially a superficial resolution, which effectively worked to block perspectives deemed radical or ‘too controversial’. This ideological work, Winship contended, was accomplished through women’s magazines’ characterization of gender inequality as an issue to be resolved by the individual acting in their everyday lives rather than as a deep-rooted problem that demanded wide-ranging social transformation. Thus, whilst appearing to engage with questions of political liberation, women’s magazines actually inhibited its realization by emphasizing a ‘postfeminist’ individual whose life could be ‘whatever you, the individual, make of it’ (Winship, 1987: 149–50).

Winship, however, went farther than Hebron in conceding the potential pleasures offered by women’s magazines. Indeed, Winship acknowledged that she was, herself, an avid reader. Women’s magazines, she observed, were a ‘chocolate box’ of treats that were read in a variety of contexts:

we escape with them in nervous moments at the doctor’s or during tedious commuting hours. We read them as relaxation at the end of a long day when children have at last been put to bed, or to brighten up the odd coffee break and lunch hour when life is getting a bit tough, or simply dreary.

(1987: 52)

Winship warned, however, that pleasure was not an experience that existed ‘beyond’ ideology. Pleasure, she explained, might feel ‘like an individual and spontaneous expression’, but it was highly coded and structured, offering women little opportunity of escape from the limited social spaces they inhabited (Winship, 1987: 52). In these terms, readers’ ‘resistance’ to the ideological messages of women’s magazines was (at best) partial and temporary.

Similar approaches were adopted in subsequent studies.² Ros Ballaster et al. (1991), Ellen McCracken (1993) and Gigi Durham (1996), for example, all arrived at comparable conclusions in their various analyses of ideology and femininity in women’s magazines. They all called the power of the ideological text into question, revealing the possibilities of negotiated and oppositional meanings that readers could develop. Nevertheless, while these authors recognized the potential spaces for counter-hegemonic, ‘resistant’ readings, they regarded these as lacking the substance needed to effect meaningful change in either wider society or the magazine genre itself.

Other accounts, however, were more optimistic about the power of the contemporary reader to resist the ideological interpellations in women’s magazines. Eva Illouz (1991), Linda Steiner (1991), Jacqueline Blix (1992) and Myra Macdonald (1995), for example, all argued that the texts offered small – but still very significant – spaces for resistance and alternative readings of women’s lives. Steiner’s optimism was especially pronounced in her account of the American pro-women’s movement magazine, Ms. For Steiner, the magazine offered possibilities of genuine political impact through its attempt to challenge and ‘de-naturalize’ the feminine styles and identities articulated in other media texts. The questions raised in Ms., she argued, might even precipitate a change in the codes and conventions operating in other women’s magazines – and even held potential for the development of a new, more progressive, hegemonic account of gender (Steiner, 1991: 343).

Feminism, postmodernism and ethnographic approaches to women’s magazines

During the mid-1980s postmodern and poststructuralist theory began to register significant impact on feminist approaches to popular culture. This shift had important implications for the study of women’s magazines, with the development of a strong critique of earlier, textually based, analyses. Feminist researchers informed by postmodern and poststructuralist theorists (especially the French intellectual Michel Foucault (1997a; 1997b)) argued that the meanings of women’s magazines – or indeed any other form of culture – were not pre-existent messages waiting to be ‘discovered’ by the researcher. Instead, they employed the concept of discourse, and began to consider the meanings of women’s magazines as ‘dialogical’, and in potential struggle with other historically and culturally specific uses of language, other forms of culture, and practices. This helped feminist researchers to develop a critique of the epistemologies prominent in philosophical thought since the

Enlightenment, and to seek new ways of interpreting the ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ of women’s lives and experiences, and new ways of analysing the cultural artefacts consumed by women (see, for example, Hekman, 1990; Ramaz-anoglu, 1993; Scott, 1990).

Influenced by these perspectives, some authors began to embrace interpretative and ethnographic methodologies in their study of women’s magazines. If the meaning of magazines was produced through discursive formations, it was argued, interpretative ethnography offered potential for discerning how particular readers make women’s magazines meaningful in specific social and historical contexts. Furthermore, this method openly acknowledged the role of the researcher, refusing to elevate the scholar to a position of informed ‘enlightenment’ that eluded ‘ordinary’ readers. According to Joke Hermes the rise of this approach marked an identifiable ‘ethnographic turn’ in audience research within media and cultural studies (1997: 217–18).

One of the earliest ethnographic approaches to women’s readings of women’s magazines featured in the final chapter of Ros Ballaster et al.’s study, Women’s Worlds (1991).³ A ‘postmodern’ scepticism to notions of ultimate ‘truth’ was clearly apparent in these authors’ assertion that ‘any critical reading or data collection or textual analysis which presents itself as value- or theory-free is misrepresenting itself’ (Ballaster et al., 1991: 127). From their interviews with groups of women, they concluded that readers were actually very conscious of women’s magazines as ‘bearers of particular discourses of femininity’, with many in the groups even making what the authors termed a ‘critical assessment’ of the magazine content (Ballaster et al., 1991: 126–37).

Nevertheless, the account offered by Ballaster and her associates remained...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: UNDERSTANDING WOMEN’S MAGAZINES
• 2: POST-FORDISM, POST-FEMINISM AND THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN
• 3: THE EMPIRES STRIKE BACK: FROM FORDISM TO POST-FORDISM IN THE BRITISH MAGAZINE INDUSTRY
• 4: WHO’S THAT GIRL?: ADVERTISING, MARKET RESEARCH AND THE FEMALE CONSUMER IN THE 1980S
• 5: SERIOUSLY GLAMOROUS OR GLAMOROUSLY SERIOUS?: WORKING OUT THE ‘WORKING WOMAN’
• 6: ‘WHAT WOMEN WANT UNDER THE COVERS’: NEW MARKETS AND THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ IN THE 1980S
• 7: ‘MARIE CLAIRE –C’EST MOI!’: MAGAZINE EDITORS, CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES AND THE ‘NEW MIDDLE CLASS’
• 8: DESPERATELY TWEAKING SUSAN: THE BUSINESS OF WOMEN’S MAGAZINES IN THE 1990S
• CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY