- 'Women's magazines down the centuries have responded to their readers desires.' Threatened by the web they must refashion themselves in order to survive, adapting to modern desires and making a point of their physical aesthetic.
- Winship agrees that the Lady's Mercury was the first women's magazine to be created, she suggests the content was very much fictional entertainment. Hughes suggests for a brief few weeks the Ladies' Mercury promised to answer any questions relating to "Love etc" with "the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex". This can be compared to modern day quite directly, as many modern magazines tackle this issue. How does this relate to the state of women's rights at the time? The modern housewife was less established at this point.
- 'Titles such as the Lady's Magazine combined a gawping love of royalty
with needlework patterns and sentimental fiction, all for the eminently
affordable price of 6d. It also, inadvertently, awakened in its readers a
hunger for authorship. Invited to send in their poems, translations and
stories, the ladies obliged, so that by the end of the 18th century a
third of the magazine's fiction was supplied by unpaid contributors.' - quite similar to zine culture?
- 1853 - Women's Domestic Magazine. A product targeted at a new market, the middle-class wife and mother who did most of her own housework. The evolution of women's situation.
- The master stroke of the magazine, however, was its coverage of fashion.
By the 1860s, each issue featured a coloured plate showing anatomically
impossible young women crammed into the latest Parisian fashion. Also contained a problems page that eventually turned slightly perverse, some say due to the editor.
- Contemporary to the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was the
Englishwoman's Journal, which explicitly campaigned for women to have a
legal, economic and social identity outside the home. As a kind of forerunner of Spare Rib, the Englishwoman's Journal
campaigned for girls to be trained as engravers, commercial artists, and
schoolteachers. - Can be linked to spare rib.
- Aware of the potential offence of its message, the magazine was careful
to take a high moral line, unlike its natural successor, the boldly
named Freewoman, which was banned by WH Smith in 1911 for being
"disgusting . . . indecent, immoral and filthy".
- Magazines for the mill and shop girls, such as Peg's Papers. Often portraying fiction about cross-class romance. The modern day comparative would be the likes of Heat.
- 'magazines, rather than naturally occurring phenomena summoned up by
their readers' desires, are in fact commodities of the most intricate
kind. Few other artefacts, after all, have to be sold twice
simultaneously to be considered successful. But this is exactly what a
magazine editor must do, selling her product both to the reader via the
cover price and to the advertisers through the rate card. As a result,
women's magazines proliferate, clone and collapse according to a
positively Darwinian model of the market.' It is just as much about
the content as the advertisement, people often forget. There's an ever
ending balance that needs to be made.
- 'women's magazines can only develop at the same rate as the culture itself, which means unevenly'
- 'Doomsayers point to the web as the eventual graveyard of the print
magazine, while others emphasise that these products are consumed in
places where access to a computer is either difficult or dangerous, the
bus or the bath'
- 'Whether in stand-alone supplements or incorporated on to the feature
pages, newspapers now roam through the familiar territories of love,
sex, food, fashion and family. Sometimes they get it wrong, but more
often they do it very well indeed. What exactly that leaves for women's
magazines, and whether they will be able to fashion something new out of
readers' residual desires, remains to be seen.'
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/20/women-pressandpublishing
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