Magazines will never die because there is a visceral feeling of having that thing in your hands and turning the pages. It’s so different on the screen. It’s the difference between looking at a woman and having sex with her.
—George Lois, former Esquire art director
From their earliest incarnations, women’s magazines have held our interest, and they continue to do so today. While competing media and changes in society may have altered the content of women’s magazines over time, in some ways it’s as relevant and unchanged today as it was more than two centuries ago, when the first women’s book was published. Today’s chick slicks still work from the premise that readers want and need to improve themselves. And why wouldn’t they? We’ve been conditioned from the very first magazine to glean advice, inspiration, and entertainment from our glossy copies, and editors continue to diligently work to please their audience—a community of women. The roots of the women’s magazines that grace your coffee table today are firmly planted in the pages of the magazines of the past.
In 1792, about fifty years after the first general interest magazine hit the stands, a publication strictly designed for women appeared named The Lady’s Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge. Though short-lived, this mouthful of a magazine was the first for American women. It was the first time in history that women were thought to need a magazine—a paper room of their own. The magazine was written deliberately for women, about women, and because of women. A three-hundred-page volume came out every six months, filled with poetry, prose, literature reviews, even foreign news, and it was designed to inspire the female mind.
The glossy seed was sown, and women’s magazines began to sprout on to the early American scene. One successful example was Godey’s Ladies Book (1830–1898). When Louis A. Godey began Godey’s Ladies Book, the magazines were distributed via mail throughout the country. Early magazines like Godey’s relied on subscriptions for their revenue, and while other magazines unleashed during this era lasted only two to four years, Godey’s— which came out monthly—survived over three decades.1
Godey’s included a variety of content, mostly short stories and poetry. Both readers and Editor-in-Chief Sarah Hale, who was one of the first and few female editors at the time, provided much of the magazine’s content. Hale invited her readers to send in their poems, essays, and stories, and they responded in droves. Magazine articles were occasionally penned by popular writers of the time, such as Edgar Allen Poe, but the majority of the magazine’s fiction arrived via unpaid contributors—mainly women readers. (Interesting that Ladies’ Home Journal launched a similar plan in 2012 known as “crowd sourcing,” in which a large volume of their content is to be contributed by readers with fresh voices.) Though Hale was one early editor-in-chief of a women’s magazine, these burgeoning glossies were helmed mostly by men, who presumed to understand and deliver what women reader’s desired.
Why the long gap between The Lady’s Magazine and the successful launch of Godey’s? Aside from the fact that women were considered second-class citizens at the time, there were also circulation issues. The only way to move magazines effectively was through the mail. Yet until the Postal Act of 1784, individual postmasters around the country were authorized to choose and distribute only the magazines they saw fit. Unfortunately, women’s magazines, often called “books,” were not deemed important enough to warrant the distribution effort.2
And what did these women’s magazines pack inside? To start, the pubs were padded with lots of “interesting facts,” otherwise known as “filler” (much the same way magazines are today), with short pieces that included studies and statistics (a diddy on how to be a proper lady, or the appropriate airing of beds, or the growth of women’s education). Other goodies included sheet music, travel stories, essays, and colorful, hand-painted fashion “plates,” which were thick cardboard inserts that illustrated the current fashions. Godey’s also covered “personal topics,” usually in the form of Dear Abby-like columns, which likely inspired readers to identify intimately with the magazine, since it offered advice on love, relationships, and social dilemmas of the time (including dealing with gossip or misbehaving servants, the proper age to marry, and reminders that passion was a requisite for a happy marriage and not just esteem).3
But with the invasion of England’s Education Act and a booming trade industry, society began to shift and so did the magazines. Women suddenly had more job options, so domestic servants were harder to hire. Families who employed household help now found themselves without extra hands.
As women began to manage more of their own domestic duties, the magazines covered them in full force. Many began introducing handy household hints, advice, even detailed recipes. More than a century later, these topics still remain staples in today’s women’s glossies.
These women’s magazines not only targeted women readers, but they also provided an outlet for women writers and editors to demonstrate their talents, an opportunity not yet extended to them by general interest magazine publishers. The earliest magazines wrote to an elite class of women readers—generally middle- and upper-class wives and daughters, suffragists, and educated women. They were yet to include advertising but were chock-full of literature, fashion plates, and etiquette advice.
As a result, the women’s magazines that popped up in the decades before the Civil War look startlingly similar to glossies we see on the stands today. Readers relied on and trusted the information printed in the pages, giving the editors incredible power and responsibility.
It wasn’t until Delineator (1863–1937) came out that women actually got a taste of a true fashion rag. While Godey’s contained fashion plates, they were simply color illustrations rather than fashion advice. Godey’s advised women on how to dress from an ethical standpoint rather than from a style perspective. In Delineator, publisher Ebenezer Butterick nixed articles about women appearing clean and chaste, and the health dangers of wearing corsets and hoops, and after having invented tissue paper dress patterns, he included one in every issue, which created a bulky but downright desirable magazine.4
GLOSSY FACT
America’s first true fashion rag was Harper’s Bazaar, published in 1867. Nearly 150 years later, it’s still running strong, with more than half a million readers. Today, it bills itself as the most “sophisticated, elegant, and provocative” fashion resource for women.
GLOSSY FACT
Vogue launched in 1892 and started as a weekly magazine for high-society New Yorkers. Early covers featured coiffed young women known as “Gibson Girls,” named after the illustrator who created the look. In the 1960s, the magazine concentrated on fashion, making models household names, and contained openly sexual article content.
At the time, only wealthy women could afford expensive fashions. Affluent American women, for example, had casts made of their bodies and sent them to dressmakers abroad, who shipped back miniature versions of their designs for approval—worn on dolls, no less. You can only imagine the expense and time involved in this convoluted process. With Delineator, suddenly just about any woman could afford to make her own fashions, thanks to a free pattern in her favorite magazine.
McCall’s and Vogue jumped on this fashion bandwagon. In addition to articles and short stories, they included clothing advice as well. This was how fashion magazines took root, becoming catalogs for the clothes and accessories available in the stores (see more on fashion in chapter 4). Being in style became a feminine prerogative, and women’s magazines became the standard resource for American women to learn about fashion crazes and foibles. A new era of fashion magazine publishing had begun.
By the end of the nineteenth century, six leading women’s magazines surpassed all others in sales. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, these magazines attracted advertising revenue and a loyal readership of women. The “Big Six,” as they became known, were Delineator, McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, and Pictorial Review.5 They all included articles, short stories, and reader correspondence, as well as fashion, fiction, and poetry. These early lady magazines also provided advice on cleaning, cooking, childcare, and fulfilling the needs of a husband—hence, the start of the how-to-please-your-man focus that would pervade so much of the content in twentieth and twenty-first century chick slicks (more on this in chapter 9, The Big O).
With their low subscription rates, these journals soon reached hundreds of thousands of female readers across the nation, becoming the preferred method for advertisers to market and sell products and services to women, and a popular method women embraced. With income to ride on and a burgeoning readership, magazines began expanding their content.
Profiles of well-known personalities also became staples and reader favorites. They ranged from popular actresses and royalty to successful society women. For instance, you might read about Harriet Quimby, the first woman to master an airplane, or about clothing designer Madame Paquin and her latest fashions. Celebrities, operatic singers, and actresses eventually became a big draw, and women readers ate those stories up—much like they do today. Fiction was also a staple by the early twentieth century, most often written by popular male writers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As were nonfiction articles on political, cultural, and social topics relevant to the times. Magazines also included plenty of prescriptive content. Everything—from tainted food and drugs or contaminated drinking water to dirty stores and venereal disease—was covered in the pages of these publications, often in an alarmist way, making them the precursors to the fear-factor articles we read in today’s women’s magazines (more on this in chapter 7). The stories played on a woman’s desire to protect her family and stay knowledgeable about controversial current issues.
But it wasn’t all fluff, fiction, and fear-mongering. In the early twenties, women’s journals focused on important social issues, such as the suffragist movement. Articles on child psychology and interior decorating also appeared as typical fodder around the 1920s, helping women manage both their home and their child’s psyche.
In these early years, the predominantly male editors of women’s magazines—including all of the Big Six—put their stamp of individuality on each publication, sometimes in progressive, prowomen ways. One editor of Pictorial Review was said to have turned his magazine from “thin and lacking clear direction” to one that published popular fiction and a number of controversial topics, such as birth control and sex education, fostering reader devotion.7
GLOSSY FACT
Founded in 1903, Redbook derived its name from its first editor, Trumbull White, because he claimed that “red is the color of happiness.”6 Today, the publication has a circulation of just over two million readers.
An editor of Delineator, when asked to make the magazine “softer,” reportedly told staffers to send a letter to readers and ask if they want a “namby-pamby magazine.”8
Yet these two editors may have been the exceptions.
When asked what type of reader Woman’s Home Companion targeted, the male editor-in-chief at the time said she was “about the same type of woman as the average member of a small-town Congregational or Presbyterian Church.”9
Naturally, the few magazines that bantered about sex tried to lead the pack by running forbidden or controversial topics. However, they were limited to the sexual facts of life and education about venereal disease. After one sex article in Ladies’ Home Journal, the magazine reportedly received hundreds of angry letters from readers cancelling their subscriptions. Pictorial Review published a list of birth control pros and cons, advocating that the only pro was better health for women by not constantly reproducing.10
But this brief efflorescence into more daring, even profeminist, content was largely derailed by the unstable times and the downfall of the economy.
After the giddy first decades of the twentieth century, one in which women enjoyed greater freedom of expression (think the culture of the flappers, for one), the Great Depression hit with a vengeance, ending this zeitgeist. Sadly, the economic downslide during the thirties put a halt to frivolous topics. Women’s journals continued to include social and political content, but began to focus much more on women as homemakers and sex objects, subjects that often became intrinsically linked.
Magazine advertisements began to appear that showed sultry beauties and provocatively dressed women juxtaposed in domestic settings pitching some kitchen or home product, and magazines used similarly styled images in articles about keeping a tidy house or pleasing a man through cooking. Women dressed in heels and pearls were shown scrubbing a floor or baking a pie, foreshadowing that once they finished their menial housework, they were still desirable, sexy creatures for a man’s pleasure.
GLOSSY FACT
Woman’s Day, which was first published in 1931 as a free in-store recipe planner at A&P supermarkets, today boasts a readership of twenty million. The average reader is in her midthirties, 56 percent of whom are married. WD boasts over three million in subscriptions, and readers can still snag a copy at the checkout counter for $2.59.
To fight the forces of the economic tide, including plummeting ad revenues, magazines began appearing in stores as point-of-sale items rather than through the mail via subscription. This shaved overhead costs significantly—from marketing to a subscriber base and maintaining it, to eliminating the expense of shipping to readers. Family Circle, which launched in 1932, became the second successful in-store distributed magazine. The publisher sold it to chain grocers like Piggly Wiggly and Sanitary Grocery Co. (later renamed Safeway), and the stores gave magazines away to customers free of charge.11 Dozens of similar magazines were given away in grocers during the 1930s. Family Circle, like Woman’s Day, was distributed only in stores, and both succeeded. Women shopping for food would presumably scoop them up while waiting at the checkout counter. A savvy selling ploy, to be sure, and one that’s still a significant part of the magazine sales system we see today.
GLOSSY FACT
The Seven Sisters were the seven women’s magazines traditionally targeted to married homemakers. The name came from the Greek myth of the “seven sisters,” or the seven daughters of the titan Atlas. In the myth, Zeus immortalized the sisters in the sky by creating the constellation Pleiades. The magazines were so named because they were at one time a constellation of the most well-known seven women’s magazines, dubbed “sister publications,” and their editors had largely arrived from the Seven Sister colleges (a cluster of liberal Northeast U.S. colleges that were at one time limited to women).12
Perhaps because Family Circle and Woman’s Day continued for many years as magazines found solely at the grocer’s, the twin publications found their niche outlasting every other grocery rag. Today both belong to the group of women’s magazines that became known as the “Seven Sisters” (see sidebar on p. 10), which included Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Redbook—though you may as well dub these grocery-only twins the two stepsisters, since they were, and still are, largely similar to one another.
GLOSSY FACT
In 1939, Good Housekeeping rocked the woman’s magazine industry with a scandal related to its Seal of Approval, a program used by GH to lure readers to their magazine by rating consumer products. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against GH, charging it with “deception in its acts and practices relating to how it issued guarantees of its seal, citing false and exaggerated claims.”13 The case lasted two years and rival magazine staffers at Ladies' Home Journal and McCall’s testified against their sister publication in hopes that the Seal of Approval would be considered unfair competition. (Yet it was an idea GH thought up first!) In the end, Hearst received a limp slap on the wrist and was ordered to merely alter the wording of its guarantee. Despite the scandal, readers remained loyal to Good Housekeeping whose Seal of Approval is still an iconic and trusted testament of quality today.
Despite these changing economic times, women continued to read magazines—if for nothing else than escapism and entertainment. Magazines now provided women with a connection to the larger world outside their own and educated them on the latest products, money-saving tips, and fashion trends. Advice and features on housekeeping and childcare continued to draw women in, and attracting and keeping a man persisted as a theme in women’s books across the board.
One Vogue editor of the time commented that “pleasing the reader” made the best magazine, but she patronizingly had to include content that was for the “best interest” of the reader.14 This, of course, assumed she knew what that was. Editors were not above manipulating readers, either. Herbert Mayes, an editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping, admitted he fashioned a phony name to the masthead so he could fabricate a phony editorial firing if a controversy erupted over content.15 If readers deluged the magazine with complaint letters, he could satisfy reader indignance by simply removing a name from the masthead, as if he’d fired the underling in charge of the story.
Eventually, editors began to assign stories rather than just wait to see what came in from contributors. Loring Schuler, an editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal, confessed to calculating a formula with which he developed content for his publication: 38 percent happiness, 37 percent entertainment, 25 percent general information.16 Each editor had their own preference, likes, and dislikes, which influenced content.
Many of the other magazines no doubt formed similar percentages of formulaic content, which today has evolved into the fixed departments, sections, and recurring columns we’re familiar with in the glossies. Editors then could acquire content to fit recurring themes—say, the feel-good essay, the investigative story, the childcare-related piece, and the how-to-land-a-man article.
As the economy tilted back toward equilibrium, magazine sales increased and advertisers began to expand their budgets. This new income allowed editors to lure top writers to their journals, but they did so with difficulty, since these magazines were still considered vehicles primarily for fluffy or “fairy” stories. Though some writers were indeed women, a large majority of contributors were males, who were then tasked with crafting stories and content of interest to the female reader, something often quite foreign to them. Worse, many male writers felt that writing for the women’s books was beneath them, despite the pay being some of the best in the magazine world. Writing for the “less intelligent” sex wasn’t considered as appealing as writing for traditional men’s or general interest magazines.17 They believed the assignments, which covered topics such as the joy of household tasks, gardening, and cooking, were “fluff.” Unfortunately, they were at the mercy of the editors and publishers, who believed these were the topics that women wanted to read about. Sadly, but not totally without merit, those prejudices continued among not only writers and readers but also with the public at large, and fluff became a descriptive catchphrase still used today to describe women’s glossies.
Not only did some writers consider the content in these magazines dreck, but when their more important pieces on politics or issues of the day were accepted for publication, they also resented that their material was surrounded by gardening advice and lovelorn tribulations.
Despite the reservations of many of the writers of the day, during both world wars, women’s books played a noteworthy role in preaching conservation and how women could help in the war effort. In fact, during World War II, women’s mags encouraged the campaign for American women to work outside the home and fill the jobs that men were forced to abandon when they went off to war.18
By the 1950s, with the war over and women put back in their place—the home—magazines again shone the spotlight on domestic chores.
The 1950s also marked another shift for the magazine industry, which faced increased competition from new media, primarily television. It was during this era that TV viewing became much more widespread. Televisions were the must-have appliance in homes, and families scheduled their evenings around favorite shows. Naturally, television drew away both readers and advertisers from the glossies, which had long dominated the limited media world at the time. In response to being bested in the entertainment niche—after all, how could a static, one-dimensional article compete with a moving, talking story in a box—magazines focused more on concrete information and how-to content. Advice articles, such as “How to Manage your Household Chores” and “6 Steps to Make the Dinner Hour More Relaxing for Your Husband,” became staples that readers could clip, save, and return to over and over—another tactic we see in women’s magazines today.
The media squeeze-out, coupled with the culture’s aggressive agenda to firmly reestablish women’s subservience to men, increased the magazine industry’s hyperfocus on the homemaker. Out of this grew the apron-clad ideal of the perky, pretty fifties housewife, who appeared suddenly like a Stepford Wife in product ads, articles, and as iconic characters in television shows. But this idealized version of the American housewife chafed at women early on, primarily because it didn’t reflect real life. The age of the airbrushed ideal was taking root. One housewife, who received a Ladies’ Home Journal makeover in the early fifties, complained that the magazine presented an ideal impossible for women to live up to. She claimed the magazines flaunted the false notion that women should be on pedestals and also be skilled housewives, seamstresses, decorators, cooks, mothers, and lovers, ensuring they could land and keep their man.
The woman, Julia Ashenhurst, a housewife, wrote:
I cannot but question the wisdom and fairness of presenting me as the wife of a teacher and mother of four young children in clothes not my own with a face and hairdo not my own. Even my waist was not my own, for I was hooked into a cinch corset which was nearly the end of me. How will my counterpart in apartments, farms, and developments all over the country feel as she sees this glamorous clotheshorse and realizes that she cannot afford to dress like that and wonders why she cannot look like that?19
That was 1951.
By the late fifties, fiction in the magazines began to decline with the increase in popular television shows and cheap paperback book prices. To win back advertisers, women’s titles divided the magazine market into demographics that shared similar characteristics and interests. There was no dearth of niche “audiences”: working moms, women over fifty, African American women, middle-class housewives interested in interior design, etc. Breaking readers into these targeted groups was good news for advertisers, and the entire magazine industry went this route. This set the standard for the magazines we see today, and it resulted in an explosion of new publications to target those special interest groups, who in turn attracted their own brand of advertisers: home and decorating magazines attracted appliance ads and paint companies, fitness and health magazines drew in vitamin distributors and athletic clothing labels. Fashion magazines lured shoe, bag, and clothing designers—along with beauty product manufacturers and perfume companies. It was niche marketing at its finest, and everyone wanted a piece of the glossy pie.
GLOSSY FACT
In 1952, Good Housekeeping started an anti-cigarette campaign—twelve years before the surgeon general’s warning was even printed on cigarette packs—by refusing to accept tobacco advertisements. While research was just starting to link cigarettes and lung cancer, GH thought that advertising a potential harmful product would not bode well for their consumer-safety focus.20
As a result, by the 1960s, many chick slicks were commercial successes. One top seller was Cosmopolitan, today one of the best-selling and most controversial lady magazines out there, due to its sex-centric focus. Cosmo, as it’s often referred to, was initially published as a fiction magazine in the early twentieth century, then revamped in 1965 to address the needs and desires of single women. The editor, Helen Gurley Brown, and the magazine’s advertisers, recognized the needs of single women with disposable income and a desire for a magazine where issues like sex, sexual prowess, birth control, and the power of so-called “feminine wiles” were covered—even exploited—to their best effect.
GLOSSY FACT
Glamour, which launched in 1939 and focused on fashion, beauty, and relationships for the modern young woman, was the first women’s magazine to put a black woman on its cover in 1968.
Other niche magazines of the time included The Advocate, launched in 1967, which paved the way for other gay and lesbian magazines; and Essence, the first major consumer publication aimed at African American women, which opened advertiser’s eyes to black women’s buying power in 1970. Other mags began to target readers by ethnicity, like Latina and Moderna. When Ms. magazine, which popularized the feminist movement, hit stands in 1972, it shattered the mold by publishing articles about women’s rights, politics, sexuality, and violence against women, which, during that time, was an elephant in the room that was rarely, if ever, mentioned in mainstream women’s magazines.
GLOSSY FACT
Lear’s, a magazine that targeted the over-forty woman, opened the door to marketing to older women but it didn’t survive. It would take twenty more years before the industry saw another attempt at reaching the more mature woman, with the successful launch of MORE magazine in 1998.
Another magazine that targeted the liberated reader was Working Woman, which launched in 1976 and was the first magazine to focus exclusively on workplace, financial, and career advice for women. Not surprisingly, by the early seventies, the standard doctrine of women’s magazines began to clash with feminism and its ideals. In 1970, feminists held a sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal. The editor-in-chief at the time, John Mack Carter, promised change. He even tried to crush the confrontation by publishing a special eight-page supplement titled “The New Feminism,” which appeared in the magazine. However, not much changed. A year later, Carter was quoted as saying, “Some of the complaints made about our magazine by the women’s lib types were right. There had been a lot of silliness cranked out to sell products and lifestyles to women, but it will never happen in this magazine again.”21
Carter went on to edit Good Housekeeping in 1975, though how much influence the protests had on the vision he brought to the pages of that journal is debatable.
Ultimately, the volcanic social changes of the sixties and seventies provided the launching point for various publications, while other magazines did what they could to keep up with the times, often reinventing themselves to stay solvent in an increasingly competitive market. Some succeeded; some didn’t.
GLOSSY FACT
Self magazine, one of the first women’s publications to focus exclusively on nutrition, health, fitness, and beauty, was launched in 1978. Today, Self enjoys a 2.7 million monthly audience and focuses on inspiring women’s fitness, diet, health, and happiness.
During the second half of the century, the two stepsisters among the seven—Woman’s Day and Family Circle—continued to flourish. But as it goes among siblings, competition was fierce between the two. To differentiate itself from Woman’s Day, Family Circle took an interesting editorial turn in the 1980s by running juicy investigative features on issues of interest to women, including toxic waste and hazardous chemicals, cluster diseases, and other fear-factor topics that women wanted to learn about to protect themselves and their families. Family Circle became a leader in investigative magazine journalism, but other magazines joined the pursuit, including another lifer: Redbook.
After peddling itself as a general interest fiction magazine in the early twentieth century, Redbook was recast as another one of the Seven Sisters. In the forties, it focused on young married women, adding more nonfiction. Its circulation climbed. In the 1970s, the magazine targeted moms. During these years, Redbook was thought of as the most intellectual of the sisters and today boasts a readership that exceeds two million.22 With its sale to the Hearst Corporation in the 1980s, it was again rebranded to appeal to women in the twenty-five to forty-four age bracket, with articles on career, home, and family. More fashion and beauty were added, and provocative pieces like “Is There Sex after Motherhood?” and “Why I Date Your Husband” appeared.23
In the early 1990s, Redbook was labeled the older sister to titles like Cosmo and Glamour. It was promoted to advertisers as the “juicy Redbook.”24 Yet with time, this once supposed hybrid fell in among the sisters as just another one of the seven popular women’s glossies.
By the 1970s, the Seven Sisters also included Better Homes and Gardens, a former gardening and home magazine that morphed into a chick slick over time.
Originally titled Fruit, Garden, and Home, the magazine evolved from the 1950s to target the home do-it-yourselfer with articles on food, decorating, gardening, and family. Advertisers of home appliances, furniture, and garden supplies shepherded the journal, sending its ad revenue soaring and lumping it in with the other six true women’s books. All but beauty and fashion were missing from the magazine, but by the eighties, they too had found their way into the magazine’s content as publishers tried to please every woman interested in home décor and gardening by adding traditional women’s magazine fare like health, beauty, money, and fashion.
But not all the Seven Sisters settled comfortably into their twilight years. McCall’s, one of the earliest sisters, met an untimely death when television personality Rosie O’Donnell dared to take over the 103-year-old title in 2000 and revamp the book with her vision, and with her at its helm.
Insider Input
“I wanted a magazine that celebrates real women, that understands that they care about more than waistlines or the latest makeup styles or fashions, that they want to be relevant and help each other and care about the world.”25
—Rosie O’Donnell, talking about taking over McCall’s
Unfortunately, Rosie (the rebranded title) folded two years later. The actress/comedienne/talk-show host reportedly had problems with the publisher, Gruner & Jahr, stating “she could no longer put her face to a publication that didn’t reflect her values.”22 Though she was editor-in-chief, the publisher’s ideas apparently clashed with Rosie’s vision. She published topics based on her personal life, including breast cancer, foster care, and adoption issues. When Rosie walked, a several-year legal battle ensued in which the publisher and Rosie sued one another for breach of contract. The judge ruled against both parties and ultimately dismissed the suit. But the damage was done. Rosie, formerly McCall’s, went belly up and one of the original Seven Sisters took her last breath.
Then there were six.
THE REMAINING SIX SISTERS AT A GLANCE
Woman’s Day: Craft ideas and home decorating
Family Circle: Parenting tweens and teens
Good Housekeeping: Anti-aging focus, health and fitness
Ladies’ Home Journal: Work, marriage, health
Redbook: Working and married mothers
Better Homes & Gardens: Garden, home décor, and family
Over the past thirty years, women’s magazines have cycled in and out of recessionary periods where first TV, music, and movies, and later computers, cell phones, and the Internet drew women’s attention away from the simple pastime of reading magazines. Our increasingly digitized world of new media and social networking suddenly demanded much more of our individual attention. Clicking and scrolling competed with the idle flipping of glossy pages, yet surprisingly, magazine circulation hasn’t totally plummeted as a result. The problem was, and perhaps still is, that there is a perception among advertisers and the public that print magazines are going the way of the dinosaurs.
In fact, The Power of Print, an industry-wide magazine campaign erected by five powerhouse magazine publishers, launched a series of ads in national glossies to address this very issue in 2010. The ads used fun, friendly text and magazine titles as fill-in words to promote the vitality of magazines as a medium. A portion of one such ad reads:
Barely noticed amidst the thunderous Internet clamor is the fact that magazine readership has risen over the past five years. . . . What it proves . . . is that a new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one. Just as movies didn’t kill radio. Just as TV didn’t kill movies. An established medium can continue to flourish so long as it continues to offer a unique experience. And, as reader loyalty and growth demonstrate, magazines do.27
Just as they did in the past, magazines today risk angering and disappointing their readers with content that arouses controversy, falls short of expectations, or fails to live up to reader’s standards—like excessive airbrushing or celebrity profiles that come up short. Editors walk a fine line each month trying to put out content free of such scrutiny.
Readers Respond
“I was very angry about two years ago when Ladies' Home Journal ran an essay written by a woman who hated her family’s cat and was happy when it got scared and ran off into a strange city while they were moving. Her thoughts were cruel and heartless. I never have—and never will—pick up an issue of LHJ again for publishing this selfish woman’s glee over the demise of a poor scared animal. To think that they actually paid someone for such rubbish angers me.”
—Sharon, training manager
Can women’s magazines survive, even thrive in the future? History shows they have and they can, by revamping formats, revising content, redesigning layouts, adding and deleting essays, fiction, contests, columns, and advice. All the while, they play with the line between reality and fantasy, all to offer readers a unique experience they cannot find through other mediums. And how do they do this?
When a publisher decides a magazine must be rebranded, like Redbook experienced several times over the past decades, the entire staff has often been let go in favor of new blood with new ideas and a slew of new writers. New contributors are coveted, and landing an interview with the hottest celebrity can send one magazine’s newsstand sales soaring, while another lags. The dance continues, tightening belts and paring down when times are lean, or assigning content to contributors with abandon and covering the latest trends, fads, and “gets” when times are fat.
Sure, the formula has changed depending on the decade, but women’s magazines today still address their readers as women, slanting material through a female lens. And while investigative articles and in-depth analyses of political and social issues are shadows of their former pieces, and fiction is gone, victims of general interest magazines and twenty-four-hour cable news, what remains are informational glossies chock-full of advice on careers, home, and family. The magazines provide entertainment. They interpret things female, whether that be sex, fashion, or health. They exude intimacy and create a sisterhood among their readership. Sadly, the ugly side exists as well. Messaging that’s damaging, airbrushed ideals of beauty and lifestyles, objectification of women, shallow topics, and misleading, even fear-mongering, content.
GLOSSY FACT
Today, all women’s magazines are helmed by female editors, and an estimated 90 percent of editorial staff and contributors are women as well. While male editors and contributors still play a role, the male stamp is less visible today than ever before.24
At their best, women’s magazines are a space to be comforted, entertained, and advised, a place that is fun to visit. Women’s glossies shine a light on us, and some may argue they dare to reveal our ideals, struggles, hopes, and dreams so that we can enrich our lives. Perhaps that’s always been the goal of the women’s magazine, no matter what the decade.
As long as readers believe they’ll get something they need, want, or value out of the glossy magazines gracing the racks at the grocery store, they’ll continue dropping them in their shopping bags.