Remake, Remodel

Women's Magazines in the Digital Age

Brooke Erin Duffy

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095221
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is a magazine? For decades, women's magazines were regularly published, print-bound guidebooks aimed at neatly defined segments of the female audience. Crisp pages, a well-composed visual aesthetic, an intimate tone, and a distinctive editorial voice were among the hallmarks of women's glossies up through the turn of this century. Yet amidst an era of convergent media technologies, participatory culture, and new demands from advertisers, questions about the identity of women's magazines have been cast up for reflection.   Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age offers a unique glimpse inside the industry and reveals how executives and content creators are remaking their roles, their audiences, and their products at this critical historic juncture. Through in-depth interviews with women's magazine producers, an examination of hundreds of trade press reports, and in-person observations at industry summits, Brooke Erin Duffy chronicles a fascinating shift in print culture and technology from the magazine as object to the magazine as brand. She draws on these findings to contribute to timely debates about media producers' labor conditions, workplace hierarchies, and creative processes in light of transformed technologies and media economies.

1

Making the Magazine

Three Hundred Years in Print

What are women's magazines? Their material attributes—sleek, glossy pages, vividly hued images, and consistent dimensions—no doubt distinguish them from other mediated forms of culture and communication. According to media scholar Lynda Dyson, magazines are carefully designed to meet the perceived needs of readers; for instance, the “feel of glossies connote[s] luxury and pleasure, despite the fact that their sale price is relatively low.” Dyson also explains that their size and portability presumably encourage leisure-time consumption and pass-along readership.¹ Of course, it would be technologically deterministic—not to mention myopic—to overlook the immaterial elements that define the magazine. In the 1970s, Raymond Williams used the concept of cultural form to differentiate the technological aspects of a medium (in this case, television) from its social praxis and human affordances. Contemporary scholars have adopted Williams's idea to think critically about the socially constructed, intangible properties of a medium—the magazineness of the magazine, if you will.

Continuities in the cultural form and function of women's magazines can be traced to the American Victorian era—if not earlier. Indeed, the first magazine targeted exclusively to a female audience was the seventeenth-century London fortnightly the Ladies’ Mercury, which promised to answer “all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress, and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or widows.”² By the next century's turn, women's magazines had become intricately woven into the fabric of Western social life, both creating and reflecting the political realities of early nineteenth-century women. Many of the features and approaches adopted during this era—advice columns, an appeal to feminine identity, fashion recommendations, and an intimate editorial tone—remain today. And while these factors helped to identify the medium, magazines were also defined by what they were not, namely newspapers and books. As magazine historian Margaret Beetham explains, “Unlike the essay-serial, [the magazine] mixed genres and had a variety of authorial voices, but unlike that other mixed periodical form, the newspaper, it carried no ‘news.’”³

This is not to say that women's magazines have no symbolic connection to other forms of mediated culture. Quite the contrary: as the first truly commercial medium, magazines set an early precedent for the production, distribution, and financing of media content. Such guidelines helped to shape the course of the commercial mass media system that unfolded over the twentieth century. Some of the specific magazine practices that I discuss in this chapter—selling audiences to advertisers in order to offset the sales price, targeting narrowly defined sections of the populace, and blending entertainment and advertising content—were later appropriated and built upon by the radio, television, and internet industries, among others. The historical significance of magazines thus goes far beyond their material properties.

It is admittedly an oversimplification to group women's magazines together as a coherent and monolithic category without at least acknowledging their variances. Certainly an haute couture title like Vogue, a service publication like Family Circle, and a monthly self-improvement guide like Self depart from one another in their approaches to content, audiences, advertisers, and more. Even those titles nestled within the same subcategory (media research firms typically break the genre into “women's service,” “entertainment/celebrity,” and “beauty and fashion”) rely on distinctive features, tones, and aesthetics to communicate their unique brand personalities to audiences (and advertisers). Hence, although Martha Stewart Living, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal fit under the rubric of what industry insiders call “service magazines,” they are unmistakably different.⁴

Notwithstanding the nuances within and across magazine categories, I share the perspective of magazine and feminist media scholars who conceptualize women's magazines as a distinct genre. Not only is the genre concept a constructive analytical intervention into the realms of cultural production, it is also meaningful for those workers embedded inside the genre's culture. As David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker explain in their recent book on creative labor, genres offer media workers “institutionalization and routinization in a highly uncertain interpretive production world.”⁵ The terms of genres, they add, are mutually constructed and continuously renegotiated. Women's magazines, then, are a distinctive media category formed through the assumptions and activities of magazine producers, audiences, advertisers, and those of us trying to understand them within a critical framework.

With regard to the latter point, I draw upon four decades of scholarship on women's magazines in an effort to flesh out the defining properties of the genre. This research follows a general trajectory that coincides with shifts in the academy and, perhaps more importantly, feminist political projects. It is thus not incidental that many scholars credit the second wave of feminism, and specifically the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, with the emergence of women's magazines as a worthy scholarly topic.⁶ Since then, media and women's studies scholars have pushed forward debates about gender, communication, commercialism, and power that collectively contribute to our awareness of what women's magazines are.

Magazines for and of Women

Any attempt to articulate the identity or meaning of the genre must start with the overtly gendered nature of the texts; they are, after all, “women's magazines.” Yet in asking “Are women's magazines necessarily magazines of and for women?” Linda Steiner, a longtime scholar of gender and media studies, productively questions whether the signifier “women” refers to the readers, the producers, or both.⁷ Much of the discourse on women's magazines takes for granted that these texts are created for female audiences. Historians have frequently used the gender of readers to set the terms of the analytical subject; as Margaret Beetham writes in the opening pages of her impressive sweep of nineteenth-century women's periodicals, “I define the ‘woman's magazine’ by its explicitly positioning its readers as ‘women.’”⁸ Popular writing on women's magazines also works from the assumption that the gender of readers (and not of producers) is what sets them apart from other cultural forms and genres.

The consideration that these periodicals are created exclusively for and targeted to female audiences has guided much of the critical literature on women's magazines over the decades, too.⁹ Through various theoretical and methodological prisms, feminist scholars have addressed the role of women's periodicals in establishing guidelines for heteronormative femininity and domesticity, in conflating gender with consumerism, and in perpetuating unrealistic standards of beauty and physical perfection, among others.¹⁰ Not only do these themes share a concern with the effect of magazines on female audiences, but they also note magazines’ discursive role in fashioning notions of womanhood and feminine identity. Betty Friedan was among the first to denounce the problematic identity constructions circulating in women's magazines by staunchly arguing that their frequent domesticity tropes stunted women's “basic human need to grow.”¹¹ As a former editor herself, Friedan was particularly critical of the fact that men made the majority of editorial decisions for women's magazines and often depicted women in polarized ways: as either housewives or careerists, who were respectively celebrated or condemned. This laid the groundwork for feminist analyses of the ways these texts socialized women and enforced an uneven distribution of power to reflect dominant sexual politics.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, scholars emphasized the significance of women's magazines to social identity formation, especially within what Marjorie Ferguson has called “the cult of femininity.” For Ferguson, these periodicals forced women into oppressive roles based on socially constructed notions of the ideal woman.¹² Her contemporaries teased out some of these roles, discussing how magazines essentially trained women to be the “perfect mother, lover, wife, homemaker, glamorous accessory, secretary—whatever best suits the needs of the system.”¹³ Of particular concern to these scholars was the function of women's glossies in creating problems that could be resolved exclusively within the commercial sphere. By engaging in aspirational consumption—shopping for a new wardrobe, lipstick shade, or china pattern—women could theoretically assuage any anxieties they felt about their inner-directed personhood. From this perspective, women's magazines endorsed a (problematic) link between heteronormative femininity and consumerism. Later in the chapter, I return to this topic and explore the unique political economies of women's magazines.

The ur-narrative behind the works of Friedan, Ferguson, and their feminist contemporaries constructs women's magazines as a powerful ideological tool that readers accept uncritically. Yet by the 1990s, some scholars began to disparage such blanket assumptions, particularly the discursive construction of women's magazines as a “problem” for women.¹⁴ If womanhood is not a singular category, some reasoned, why should we assume that readers interpret the texts in a singular way?¹⁵ This individualist turn in the literature dovetailed with a methodological one; it was considered increasingly important to study readers’ responses to magazines rather than to make inferences about their reception. Joke Hermes made an especially significant departure from earlier traditions by talking to readers about how, when, and why they used magazines. Her findings emphasized the pleasurable aspect of reading women's magazines while dispelling claims of their totalizing effect.¹⁶ Thus, she showed how an individual can read a periodical for advice, escapism, entertainment, or even to criticize; the correlation between identity and magazines is not necessarily fixed.

While the move to studying magazine readers granted audiences a certain degree of agency and, perhaps, resistance, it did little to acknowledge the contributions of magazine makers. Much as in the larger field of media studies, then, the production of content was a mere afterthought. In the past decade, however, a handful of researchers have realized the critical need to study the production dynamics of women's magazines. Either implicit or explicit in these writings is the prominence of women in creating the content of and markets for women's magazines. Revisiting Linda Steiner's question “Are women's magazines necessarily of and for women?” it becomes clear that the gendered work culture of women's magazines is also among their defining features.

Since at least the eighteenth century, women have been involved in magazine production as contributors, writers, editors, and more. In fact, the magazine business was considered one of the few acceptable career sites for women in antebellum America.¹⁷ Such popular acceptance was based on the fact that writing jobs could be completed in the privacy of one's home rather than in public workspaces, which were considered unfit for “proper” Victorian women. While countless females contributed to these early magazines, a few trailblazers rose to the highest ranks of the profession. Nineteenth-century writer Sarah Josepha Hale, for one, has been mythologized and celebrated for her transformative role in upending the gender composition of magazine journalism. Hale was appointed editor of Godey's Lady's Book in the 1830s after American publisher Louis Antoine Godey merged his namesake magazine with an existing women's title. During a tenure spanning four decades, Hale led Godey's to become the most widely read periodical of its day. Breaking with the patriarchal business model, she hired female writers and designers and regularly incorporated the creative contributions of readers. Within this context, scholar Amy Beth Aronson credits Hale with opening up spaces for middle-class women to serve as agents of change.¹⁸

Later in the nineteenth century, legendary magazine publisher Cyrus Curtis appointed his wife, Louisa Knapp, editor of a one-page supplement titled “Women at Home,” which grew into the still-strong Ladies’ Home Journal (at the time called the Ladies’ Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper). Knapp Curtis published articles on topics she felt were relevant to American women in the early years of industrialization, including “Mother's Corner,” “Needlework,” “Dress and Material,” and “The Practical Housekeeper.” Like Hale, she is credited with producing a women's magazine that was written predominantly by individuals who intimately understood the issues and challenges of nineteenth-century womanhood: other women.

Another prominent female figure in the early magazine industry was Ida Tarbell, the famed writer and activist who was largely responsible for launching the muckraking movement during the Roosevelt era. As one of the few college-educated women in fin-de-siècle America, Tarbell called out the injustices of monopolistic enterprises with her report on the Standard Oil Company. Her revelations of the unethical practices of Rockefeller's company were published as a nineteen-part series in McClure's Magazine beginning in 1902, signaling the emergence of investigative journalism. Although Tarbell was not involved with women's magazine production per se, she did recognize the great potential of female writers in the industry. In her 1887 article “Women in Journalism,” Tarbell identified some key female journalists while issuing a clarion call for other women to join the profession, which offered “large opportunities for doing good, for influencing public opinion, and for purifying the atmosphere of the times.”¹⁹

These triumphant tales of female magazine pioneers spotlight the role of women in shaping the contours of the magazine industrial complex. However, other historical studies challenge—or at least complicate—these narratives of female agency. For one, some of the “female” editors and senior contributors were actually males writing under pseudonyms. Arnold Bennett, for instance, who served as editor of Woman in the late 1890s, often wrote under the moniker of Barbara, Marjorie, or Marguerite.²⁰ During this same era, the male editor-in-chief of Modern Priscilla adopted the feminine name “Miss Beulah Kellogg.”²¹ This surreptitious strategy implies a complicated negotiation whereby men understood the value of female personae who could connect with readers, yet they were unwilling to part with some combination of their economic and cultural power.

Accordingly, other writers identify the early twentieth century as the moment when it became widely acceptable for women to enter the publishing field. A confluence of factors—including the economic growth of the magazine industry and political projects such as the women's suffrage movement—opened the door to female writers and editors at various levels. Prominent female editors of this era include Gertrude Battles Land of Woman's Home Companion, Edna Woolman Chase of Vogue, and Elizabeth Jordan of Harper's Bazaar.²² The number of female journalists also grew considerably during this time. Unfortunately, a disparity between the mostly female staff and male senior executives continued to mark the industry. Correspondence from females working in the industry in the early to mid-1900s reveals unfavorable working conditions: they were paid less, experienced gender-based harassment, and received pejorative treatment from male colleagues.²³

With the second wave of feminism came heightened concerns about the production and consumption of mediated culture—especially women's magazines. A particularly remarkable protest event unfolded in 1970, when more than one hundred women stormed the office of Ladies’ Home Journal editor John Mack Carter to condemn depictions of females that came from the magazine's overwhelmingly male staff. As feminist scholar Bonnie Dow explained, “For eleven hours, protestors demanded an all-female editorial s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Questioning Media Identity in the Digital Age
• 1. Making the Magazine: Three Hundred Years in Print
• 2. Transforming the Magazine: From Print to Bits
• 3. Production Tensions: New Positions, Routines, and Gender Roles
• 4. Rethinking Readership: The Digital Challenge of Audience Construction
• 5. Inviting Audiences In: Interactive Consumers and Fashion Bloggers
• 6. Off the Page: Medium-Specific Approaches to Content
• Conclusion: Remaking the Magazine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author