Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman's Magazine (Women in Society

Women in Society: A Feminist List

by Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, Margaret Beetham

Why do women read magazines? This study explores the pleasure and dangers of the popular magazine for women since its first appearance in the late seventeenth century to the present day. Examining everything from changes in print technology to gender ideology, the authors argue that it is through its heterogeneity and its ability to contain contradiction that the woman's magazine has maintained its cultural influence. From their inception, women's magazines have posited female subjectivity as a problem, offering themselves to female readers as a guide to living, a means of organizing, responding to and transforming their experiences as women. But they have also functioned as mediators of pleasure, fantasy, and escape. Challenging this critical dichotomy in the analysis of popular culture between production and consumption, the woman's magazine has always been a crucial site for the negotiation of gender and class identity.

196 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely informative book and is written excellently; however, I read this for the purposes of my PGR Dissertation and it was not helpful for what I was personally after.