Essay - Inside Women's Magazines by Janice Winship

Inside Women's Magazines by Janice Winship:

It's important to note that this was published in the 1980s, so the opinions and arcs do not take into account the 'internet age'. Which is undoubtedly linked to the success of magazines.

Looking back - with thoughts on the present:

• Winship believes that many women go through their live with only personal histories having meaning: life-time memories, the oral history passed on from generation to generation. She suggests that women's magazines have been short lived throughout time, often going out of print, so few people know what impact they had on their ancestors today. pg16 Feminists from other times have had to 'rescue' and 're-rescue' their past for it to be know. pg19
• 'Such collective knowledge can provide a strength for women to share; it is also an analytical tool with which to prise apart our present lives and begin to carve a different way into the future.' pg19
• Talks about how women's magazines have consistently tried not to take a political stance, in particular Woman. She suggests that 'Not accepting feminist politics is just as political in some sense as being an active feminist.' pg19
• Each magazine has an ideological pattern and these patterns are the 'product of many historical developments and are constantly being reworked to make sense and deal, as best they can, with the changing experience of women's lives' pg23

Women's magazines from the past:

• First significant women's magazine was 'The Ladies' Mercury' published 1693 and 'The Lady's Magazine' in 1770.
• This aimed to occupy upper class women with amusing fiction or 'autobiography' full of virgins, lovers, suicide and heroes. They also had educational pieces and were a far cry for the 'homemaking' magazines that were to come later. Perhaps this is something that could be explored in a modern context, as fiction appears far less in magazines. pg23
• Changes to industrial capitalism in the 1780s forward gave rise to a new kind of 'middle-class', where women were generally expected to be model homemakers. The most respectable wife in Victorian times was one that did not work outside of the home. 
• The 'English Woman's Domestic Magazine' contained some fiction but was very much about the practical and domestic: where to lunch, gardening and cooking tips, how to treat illness. This was a blueprint for the modern magazine industry. The mass publishing of this allowed by improved technology and invested capital meant literary and purchasing power of the working class increased. However so did production costs, causing a need for advertising.
• Beginning of the 20th century magazines available more than doubled.pg26
• Characteristics are still discernible in 1980s. Upper class: chronicling 'society', middle class: home and fashion and working class: romantic and melodramatic fiction. pg27

The Lady's Magazine

• Woman had added attraction because of its coloured pages of glamour, daydream and pleasure - significant in post-war Britain. Typically a time of austerity. pg27
• 'There is no doubt that the war stretched the women's magazine's and tested them as never before. And in this atmosphere of practicality, improvisation and strong comradely feeling the magazine throve... we were so short of paper that circulations were held down. As the papers developed more and more strongly their service approach and at the same time wisely kept up the entertainment value of their fiction, a tremendous unsatisfied demand built up.' - Mary Grieve, 1964, Millions Made My Story, pg134. The austerity of the war pushed the industry into a new era.