Deconstructing Woman's Magazines

I cannot imagine anybody among us who has not turned over the sheets of a womenÕs magazine or skim through the pages of and devour most texts. Most magazine dub themselves as the perfect one for fearless female readers of the modern times. Have you ever wondered the history of these magazines, how they are not what they appear to advocate, whether they practise what they preach?

Until 1640 the word "magazine" was referred to a storehouse for arms or supplies. Not until the eighteenth century and with the first publication of "The Gentleman's Magazine" in 1731, was it used to denote a periodical publication directed toward a general readership.

Throughout the seventeenth century the British public gained its news information from newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets. The periodical essay paper, and later the magazine, offered a quite different mode of consumption for the news. The magazine had multi -authorships and offered a variety of not necessarily interrelated items. In 1712 the Tory government endeavoured to control the flood of political propaganda by imposing a Stamp Tax of a penny or a halfpenny on every copy of asingle or half sheet publications. It also introduced a tax on paper and advertisements. Publishers succeeded in finding a loophole by expanding such productions beyond the single sheet so that they were qualified as pamphlets and were taxed at the lower rate. These new journals compensated for the paucity of material by switching to weekly or monthly and padded the text with commentary, literary extracts and reviews, popular fiction, readers's letters and so forth. This heterogeneity, juxtaposing different genres, mixing print and photography, allowing both open-endedness and routinization shows the congruence between the repetitive open-ended form of women's magazine and the rhythmic, cyclical nature of women's lives which are devalued in masculinist culture championing teleology and closure.

The magazine appears to have been the result of some clever manipulation on the part of the demogogues of print culture. Two periodicals of the early and mid eighteenth century which claim female authorships are "The Female Tatler" (1709-1711) and "The Female Spectator" (1744-1746) which offer an example of the new domestic magazine that came to dominate women's periodical literature, providing a 'conduct book', focusing almost exclusively on the trials and tribulations of romance. The Female Spectator marks the advent of two major changes in the history of the women's magazine.First, it marks the transformation from the single essay to the miscellany form. Second, it marks a political change which defines its readers in terms of domestic enclosure and their absence from politics.

The early nineteenth century magazine offered both amusement and instruction. The absence of news came to distinguish the magazine from any other types. The development of the periodical without news was partly a shrewd commercial strategy devised by the new press entrpreneurs to avoid payment of the tax. By the time stamp duty was finally lifted in 1853 the magazine was firmly established. The early periodicals offered their readers three roles as wives,mothers, and mistresses. Although women were expected to oversee their household and to control the family expenditure. What was at issue was how to make girls fit into mates for men.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a truly popular or mass press evolved on a scale unimaginable a century earlier. At the most general level, the development of the magazine designed to be read by the middle class family was an important element. What it conveyed was the domestic ideology. Domestic ideology was not monolithic and static. There was tension between the ideal of the maternal woman whose beauty is inner and spiritual and the assumption that femininity means physical beauty. The image is that of woman as object of desire: the garments displayed were not suitable activity or work of any kind. This sits oddly with the ideal femininity in terms of cookery and gardening. The contradiction between the magazine as work-manual, directed toward the homemaker, and the magazine a spurveyor of pleasure directed toward the leisured woman was conspicuous. On one hand they allow the readers the pleasure of asserting them as they are and on the other hand .They offer the readers a peak into the world of the very rich.

By 1990, most of the characteristics of the earlier magazine have been used in different combinations. For example, the illustrated interview or article about a personality who can be filmstars/ soap opera stars function as a source of fantasy for readers and the members of the Royal Family, accompanied by the Agony Column, and advertising. Although after the second world war the pressing need to recruit women into a range of jobs outside the home made itself felt through the women's magazines, the stress on the importance of women's domestic role does not disappear, that's why advertisers have joined in the pressure on housewives to make their homes ever cleaner and more efficient through the acquisition of new domestic appliances . The assumption that the women's first responsibility is home persists. What the woman's magazines advocate now goes centuries back. These magazines maintain the dual theme of women's moral superiority and social subordination to the men, and that women want to be independent, active, self-supporting, individualistic, and argue that they could do this as long as they remain womanly in all the tenderness of love. Women have always been defined as the desirable and the domestic one.

To most magazines today, women's concern is with personal and emotional relationships. While most magazines are keen to promote themselves as the champions of the young, free and single woman, they offer advice on how to acquire and keep the desired object. Even for the magazines which have an average readers's age of fifty the implied reader is married with children and has the maintenance of a stable home life, so the suitable tips are given. Women's magazines give sound advice on how to look glamorous and desirable. Their careers are given due importance but are always secondary to their relationships.

American Cosmopolitan

155 pages on ads
Featured Topics

13    sex and love
13    beauty and fashion 6 health and fitness
6      stars and entertainment
2      life and work

British Cosmopolitan

139 pages on ads
17    sex and love
9      fashion
8      health and beauty
3      self
2      career
2      Holywood

Turkish Cosmopolitan

83 pages on ads.
8      sex and love
6      fashion
5      health
6      beauty
6      stars
2      career

From the girl's magazine to the most popular women's magazine there is an evident tension between the need to confirm the centrality and desirability of men in all women's lives and the equally insistent recognition of men as a problem for and a threat to women . They are lazy, untidy, forgetful, neglecting, imperfectly socialized, problem makers, sometimes violent, require constant maintenance and upkeep both physically and psychically, are prone to faithlessness and heart breaks, and in recent years sexist and oppressive. It is important for girls to distinguish between two types of boys: bad ones who are attractive but who abuse and disappoint and the good ones who are at first dull but turn out to be saviors. Girls can be proactive in engineering relationships but they should conceal this from boys. Even when they take the initiative thay are still encouraged to appear passive. sexual attractiveness and its achievement is given a high priority.The responsibility for maintaining and improving relationships is women's. Stable, companionate relationships which endure are valued more highly. Women are not considered as truly fulfilled until they find the right man. On one hand, women are most frequently understood as acting in the service of men as secretaries, cooks, mothers and wives. On the other hand, women's magazines devote considerable space and energy to asserting the intrinsic and equal value of the feminist sphere. They are also addicted to visual and verbal images of powerful women in square shouldered suits, hailing taxis. Today many women are employed outside the home.Nevertheless, domestic role is prior to the paid employment. Coverage often takes the form of an interview with a woman about her job. However, the magazines present domestic work as women's responsibility. They focus on the skilled aspects of domestic labor such as home decorations, cooking and gardening. They do by pointing out that a happy home and family are not givens but like everything else worth having, must be worked for. Sections on food and cooking utilize unusual,exotic and creative leisure activity.

One of the common themes which unite magazines is consumption. Shopping is elevated to the status of self-expression. Expensive fashion and beauty products dominate the magazines. Illustrations are lavish and stylish. If these magazines represent beauty as fashion, style and individuality, they also encourage women to look similar. Self beautification is essential to women to look charming and alluring. The two assumptions on which the concept of look is based: all women share a major preoccupation with the way in which they look and all women can improve their appearance by the application of time and effort and through the purchase of certain products.

Advertisements draw on a range of constructions of femininity as well. They are targetted since women are responsible for their families, and women are susceptible to utopian promises and women control household expenditure and are the buyers of commodities for themselves and others.

Advertising is regarded as pervasive if the person, generally women, who seems particularly responsive to advertising, is moving up from one class to another. Surveys always show that women and young people are the key decision makers.Many members of the Frankfurt School think that totalitarianism emerged in the twentieth century as a result of the subjugation of every aspect of life to commercial values,as aresult of corrupt social institutions, and as a result of an aura created by the mass media to orient the people. What the mass media does on women is the ultimate form of corruption. The individuals lose their souls, they fall into stupor, they become insensitive to their own needs. Addiction to the media and advertisements result in an absolute docility. Curran (1991) holds that the Frankfurt School sees the function of the media as controlling the public in the interests of capital. However, some earlier surveys held in the USA indicate that the audience is not homogeneous and the media has little or no independent effect on public opinion. Indeed rather these changing attitudes or behavior confirm the staus qou. on the other hand, the study done by Lazarsfield, Berelson and Gaudet admit that fifty -eight percent of the changes were dependent upon the media. The media raise interest, fix the opinions and inform the people. Another view of the press is that they reinforce and legitimize the present structure. The media distract public attention from real problems by manufacturing events and inflating trivial issues. For example, the women's magazines encourage women to stand up for their rights, but the strategies for achieving equality are individual rather than collective. In the advertisements a lot of space is covered with the beauty products which cost a lot. However, the importance of the veggies, fruit or herbs are not mentioned. The outfits designed for women are not realistic or suitable to the home life.Women as desired objects are reflected in the ads, but the the question remains whether it is as a result of the female narcissism or a result of the male fantasy. In the old magazines the corset carried a set of meanings which concerned not beauty but society and decorum. Now the bras replace it as it is the controlled, regulated body which wears them."If you want a girl to grow up gentle and womanly, lace her tight" (English Domestic Magazine N.S. 2,III 1867) can be compared to "Vassarette: He'll give a damn" (Cosmopolitan, September 1998)

Apart from the ads uniting magazines, most of them have fictions dealing with a range of subjects, the serial novels focus relentingly on a youthful and beautiful heroine, her quest for a hayyp marriage, and her encounter with trials and disappointments. the woman is dependent on a man not only to define her social role but to bring her to full sexuality. The question of whether she represents a male fantasy of female sexuality or a female desire is left to the readers.

From the start the celebrities play an important part in the periodicals. In the nineteenth century Victoria was described as having made her choice in favor of a working rather than show monarch. every moment was regulated with due regard to her many duties. The royal lives on these magazines reiterated that even royal work must be subordinate to the primary demands of the family Victoria was a true woman because she placed her domestic and familial relationships before her public role. Till two years ago Diana was the embodiment of a woman who was dressed well and who put her sons first.

To sum up, there are a number of changes that have taken place in the form since John Dunton published the first number of his short-lived " Ladies' Mercury" in 1693. Now magazines are controlled and maintained by powerful conglomerates. However, women's magazines posit a collective and yet multivalent female subjectivity. Although magazines do address women's rights to orgasmic heterosexual sex, labour outside the home or financial independence, they continue to function within the ideology which relocates women within domestic frameworks. Orgasm amkes a woman a better aprtner for her man, labor outside the home makes family or private life more exciting, financial independence ensures that children can be supported despite the feckless natutre of the opposite sex. The magazines expose the ideological and social contradictions that problematize the business of becoming female for women. However, their heterogeneous form exposes the paradoxical nature of constructions of female identity (Women should be thin but their love is the chocolate cake. they should have careers, but childcare is their individual responsibility.) As Margaret Beetham (1996: 5) maintains well, the magazine is a text which interacts with the culture which produces it and which it produces. It is aplace where meanings are contested and made. Unlike people who see the women's magazines as being in tension with the dominant masculine values and power structures, one should see them as consonant with and reinforcing these structures.

References

Ballaster, Ros & Beetham, Margaret & Fraser, Elisabeth & Hebron, Sandra. Women's Worlds. London.Macmillan,1991.
Barbero, Jesus Martin. Communication, Culture and Hegemony. London: Sage, 1987
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own. London: Routledge,1996.
Corner,John. Documentary and the Mass Media. London: Edward Arnold Inc., 1986.
Curran, James & Seaton,Jean. Power Without Responsibility. London: Routledge, 1991.
Endres, Kathleen & Lueck, Therese. Women's Periodicals in the United States. London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Jenks, Chris. Culture. London: Routledge, 1993.
Scannel, Paddy & Schlesinger, Philip & Sparks, Colin. Culture and Power. London: Sage, 1992.
Strinati, Dominic & Wagg, Stephen. Popular Media Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.