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Constructing exemplarity and community, “Famous Women” biographies inscribed both precedents and potential lives for editors and readers, echoes of, or templates for, these women's unwritten autobiographies. Not that Arabic language autobiography was an unwritten genre. Pre-nineteenth-century men had tackled the writing of the self. As time went on—and with “Famous Women” ensconced in women's journals—Egyptian feminists wrote autobiographies, as did entertainers. Women's magazines—and biographies therein—assume and construct an active, female reader. This chapter unpacks discourse on girls' education as biography displayed it, in conjunction with the textual construction of the female reader. It then asks what biography said about gendered (and generation-specific) norms of public behavior as a symbolic field in which social, economic, and political agendas were contested—and which shaped polemics on education. The chapter explores how public politics as a sphere of female action and ambition shaped life narratives, whether biographies and other material in the women's press articulated a feminist politics, and the messages that the many lives of female rulers conveyed.

This chapter reads closely the thirty-year run of The Farmer’s Wife, the single national periodical marketed to farm women in the modernist period, addressing its cultural placement in reference both to other agrarian periodicals and to mainstream women’s magazines. The first section evaluates the overlapping but also competing ideologies of agrarianism and domesticity within TFW, especially in its attempt to shape a modern farm woman through advertising, features, and editorial content. The second section considers the magazine’s agrarian-themed fiction, addressing how the force of narrative momentum helped to contain an increasingly fractured set of attitudes about both farming and women within a reassuringly upbeat rhetorical trajectory.

For Alan Boon's linking of his firm with Woman's Weekly and other popular magazines represents a turning point in the development of Mills & Boon, the romantic novel, and editorial policy. From their offices in Fleet Street or as far north as Dundee, the editors of women's magazines became Mills & Boon's unofficial outside readers, an extension of the firm's editorial department. The women's weekly magazines in Britain emerged from the war with an enhanced readership and circulation. Because the magazine editors understood Mills & Boon's dependence, they did not hesitate to demand changes and dictate policy. But the relationship between Mills & Boon and the women's magazines, though mutually beneficial, was never easy. To his credit, Boon defended his authors vigorously, and often two versions of a novel were published: the serial form for the magazine, and the original manuscript for the library market. Although reader reaction to Burchell's novel was negative, Mills & Boon none the less published it, as it was a good story, respecting the author's craft.

Qadriyya Husayn, Turkish princess in Egypt, wrote about Egyptian queens and early Muslim women. She carried on the work of Zaynab Fawwāz and, like her, privileged some features of the tabaqāt tradition and muted others. These shifts emerged also in biographies of “Famous Women”—of Fawwāz, Husayn, and hundreds of others—that appeared in periodicals in Egypt targeted largely at women as subject and audience, and edited primarily by women. For, from its emergence in 1892, “the women's press” celebrated famous women, borrowing texts from Fawwāz and Husayn, and writing many others. We have already watched Labība Hāshim editing life stories taken from Scattered Pearls on the Generations of the Mistresses of Seclusion, expanding the range of biographical subjects. This chapter introduces that range and describes the magazines themselves by scrutinizing the politics of address of the earliest ones. It sets the emergence of women's magazines and the siting of “Famous Women” therein into Egypt's shifting political scene.

The introduction examines the potential reasons for the critical neglect suffered by women’s magazines and more ‘popular’ genres generally. Conversely, it looks at why this genre remains so favoured by women writers and readers, and why women who never read books read magazines. It examines the fundamentally dialogic, ‘personal’ quality of women’s journals which points up their feminist potential for an ongoing and egalitarian negotiation between French women and the roles posited in the press destined for them. If the sheer regularity of publication and the often intimate nature of content serve to increase the impression of authenticity and overall proximity to the topical ‘dailiness’ of the French women readers the press seeks to attract, that relationship is not solely one of reflection: early journals not only mirror the current day-to-day reality of women’s position in French society but often endeavour to prescribe and promote non-conventional female figurations, particularly those journals with a feminist content. The book’s interest lies above all with the textual representations of women in the French press and how these adapt – or not – over the period in question; with how women’s political aims find expression; and with the dialogue established between woman writers and readers.

Sheehy’s place in the history of the midlife crisis is central; her book was more than popularized psychology and it garnered millions of readers. Passages was a great success—although Sheehy’s right to intellectual property was contested at first. The idea of midlife crisis filled the void left behind by linear postwar theories of the life course, which were ill equipped to account for the social transformations of the 1970s. Sheehy’s appeal crucially depended on her feminist agenda and social-scientific outlook. Looking at journalistic and professional reviews as well as excerpts, Chapter 4 negotiates the relationship between feminism and the media and examines the impact of “pop science” on academic research. It points to the role of the mass media—especially women’s magazines—as a platform for visions of women’s lives beyond domesticity. In a period of economic crisis and changing social norms, feminism, with its demands for careers for women and new roles for men, turned from an oppositional movement into a cultural tenet. Sheehy’s description of the midlife crisis offered readers of different generations advice for planning or changing their lives, respectively. Passages was also read by social scientists: “pop science” provided a starting point for new research.

This chapter traces the history of women's magazines that spans 300 years. Drawing upon four decades of scholarship on women's magazines, it examines the defining properties of the genre, and particularly the consideration that these periodicals are created exclusively for and targeted to female audiences. It also discusses the ways in which editors-in-chief create and maintain the identity of their publications while establishing the magazine as an intimate imagined space, and how consumerism and citizenship became intertwined in women's magazines. The chapter shows that the history of women's magazines has been defined by the creation of imagined communities of interest, the increasing specialization of titles, and the symbiosis of the magazine and advertising industries.

Despite the much-documented rise of periodical studies, no major study of the late eighteenth-century women’s magazine exists. Those who have devoted specific attention to the form, either as an epilogue to studies of the essay periodical or as a prelude to the Victorian women’s magazine, commonly misrepresent it. In this chapter, Jennie Batchelor interrogates these oversights and distortions and offers a reassessment the women’s magazine in relation to the periodical genres in whose company the magazine is often considered a poor relation. The chapter proceeds with an extended consideration of one of the women’s magazine’s earliest and most influential examples – the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) in relation to earlier ladies’ magazines and periodical forerunners such as Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1). Revealing the multiple ways in which the magazine demonstrated its commitment to women’s education, Batchelor challenges accounts that have seen eighteenth-century women’s magazines as the beginning of the end for their female readers and that have erroneously associated the genre with a uniformly and oppressively conservative gender ideology.

Since the late nineteenth century, readers and listeners in Egypt had enjoyed many satirical-colloquial periodicals, and some had featured caricatures of politicians. But the illustrated weekly of news and entertainment was just emerging, soon to be joined by magazines that specialized in theater, radio, and film. That women were important as magazine consumers is attested by The Bride's focus and longevity. And that “Famous Women” continued to be important to this type of magazine was signaled by their inclusion as part of the periodical's mission. But now it was “portraits” rather than “biographies” that were prominent. As The Bride featured portraits, it also offered biographies, and this chapter's epigraph from its profile of the Begum of Bhopal confirms that it offered names familiar to the readers of women's magazines. It is worth recalling, too, the emergence of a curious genre in the 1920s that bridged “autobiography” and “fiction” more deliberately, perhaps, than do most autobiographies, at least until recently.

This chapter considers the symbiotic relationship between William Faulkner’s writing and women’s domestic fiction, particularly in his novels The Wild Palms and The Mansion. During the interwar period, women’s magazines published a wide range of fiction, both serialized novels and short stories, and the literary influence of women’s magazines continued in the postwar period, when Faulkner published two short pieces in Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. This chapter argues that Faulkner was aware of this market, targeted it as a publication venue, and shaped his fiction based on the conventions of middlebrow domestic fiction. This argument broadens recent investigation of Faulkner’s catholic engagement with print culture to include a women’s reading and writing community consistently overlooked by literary critics.

This chapter examines the influences that shaped Plath as a fiction writer. There are five sections, each of which examines one of the major such influences. These are: (1) Virginia Woolf (2) The New Yorker. Previous critics have examined Salinger's influence on Plath. Here I add a discussion of the women writers for the New Yorker that influenced Plath most – Jean Stafford, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mavis Gallant. The latter's Green Water, Green Sky is a particularly significant precursor of The Bell Jar. (3) Women's magazine fiction of the 1950s (4) Women's madness narratives, such as Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit. (5) Ted Hughes, who wrote numerous plot sketches for Plath to write up into stories. The mutual influence of Plath's and Hughes' stories, particularly in the genre of fable, is also discussed.

This chapter discusses the portrayals of women's lives in Plath's short stories. The first section deals with her women's magazine stories, published and unpublished. It argues for their political complexity, their environmental vision, their complex gender politics, and Plath's conflicted relationship to the genre. Next, the chapter examines Plath's series of stories about the home, in which she simultaneously values and criticises contemporary attitudes towards women. The chapter then discusses the complex nature of feminine identity, particularly as mediated through contemporary beauty adverts, in stories such as ‘Platinum Summer’. It concludes with a discussion of the role of violence in Plath's fiction, especially in ‘Sunday at the Mintons’ and ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’.

This chapter focuses on the March 18, 1970, sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ), a crucial episode in feminist media activism that had dramatic internal and external consequences for women's liberation. Conceived as a radical action by a small group of women incensed at the demeaning portrayal of women in a publication that touted itself as “the magazine women believe in,” the LHJ protest was an unpredictable success, precipitating significant changes in editorial and employment practices at women's magazines. That outcome was the product of several factors, including the emphases of the print and broadcast coverage of the LHJ events as well as the action's timing among a wave of protests and discrimination complaints launched in 1970 by women employees of major media institutions. Equally important was the recognition of the magazine's editors—and those of their sister publications—that incorporating and commodifying women's liberation was more profitable than resisting it, processes that would soon escalate across all forms of mass media.

This chapter charts the development of the women’s magazine market in the twentieth century. It argues that while commercial magazines are principally leisure purchases shaped by the expectations of industry and advertisers, they are also spaces where sifting and contested ideas of femininity are worked through. Focusing on two moments of significant social and political change for women, the chapter explores the ways that magazines navigated discourses of feminism and political citizenship alongside familiar tropes of consumer femininity. In the interwar years politicians initially courted newly enfranchised women, and magazines sought to encourage women’s political engagement through a mobilisation of the term 'housewife'. Additionally, an examination of the young women's magazine Honey sheds light on the 1960s and 1970s when both the youth movements and women's liberation came to prominence.

This chapter examines the changes in courtship practices in Korea in the twentieth century, exploring the means and circumstance through which Koreans have redefined the process of getting married. It traces the evolution of the feminine ideal based on analysis of women's magazines, which the author considered an influential source of discourses about weddings. The chapter also discusses “beautiful bride” and “beloved wife,” emergent notions constructed through and around courtship practices in an emergent political economy.

WOMAN’S OUTLOOK was first published in 1919 as a magazine for the women of the co-operative movement. Despite extensive scholarship on the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG), both within the organisation and in relation to the British women’s movement, this publication has received only limited attention. This chapter examines Woman’s Outlook as part of the interwar co-operative women’s movement, arguing that it functioned at a variety of levels to bring women together into a co-operative community. Woman’s Outlook represented a group of women who were not captured in other publications, and who shared particular concerns as working class women committed to co-operative ideas and trading. While it promoted the co-operative movement more widely, within the movement it served as a means of sharing information with and from its readers on effective home management (thereby responding to women’s immediate lives and needs) and aimed to extend women’s interests beyond the home. In these ways, it proved both educational and aspirational, expanding women’s horizons at a time when opportunities for women were changing, by showing what other women had and could achieve. The most sustained analysis of Woman’s Outlook to date is Rachel Ritchie’s study of Woman’s Outlook and Home and Country, the magazine produced by the Women’s Institute (WI). While Ritchie focuses on the 1950s, the goal here is to revisit Woman’s Outlook and its place in informing and educating a community of co-operative women from its inception in the interwar years.

In this chapter, Beetham offers a valuable overview of the emergence of the domestic magazine across the second half of the nineteenth century. Though acknowledging the ‘complex meanings of “home” and the “domestic” and how they relate to femininity,’ Beetham argues that ‘it is in the pages of the magazines read by the “ordinary” woman at home where those debates were and are worked through in that complex interweaving of materiality, emotion, and ideology in which we all struggle to give meaning to our lives’ (18). Beetham’s historical sweep of the domestic magazine as a publishing genre includes Samuel Beeton’s trailblazing Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–90), evangelical mothers’ magazines, and the cheap penny weeklies of the 1890s. She considers the ways in which we define such publications, account for their contradictions, and understand their relationship to earlier ladies’ magazines, together with new elements of their own invention and later of the New Journalism. In this way, she provides an important foundation for the essays in this section and the volume as a whole.

This book explores the notions of remaking and remodeling the magazine by focusing on how women's magazines are evolving from objects into brands in the digital age, along with its implications for both producers and consumers of content. It considers how “traditional” media industries are transforming in a digital era of media, and more specifically, how producers are confronting vexing questions about the identity of the women's magazine. The book highlights three identity constructions: organizational identity, professional identity, and gender identity. It also discusses the implications for how, when, and where media producers work; how the cross-platform and interactive logics of production challenge the traditional categories of readers and audiences; and what is at stake for the content that gets distributed in various media forms. It shows that, in light of the boundary shifts associated with media convergence, magazine producers are ostensibly compelled to (re)define their industries, their roles, their audiences, and their products. The goal of this book is to initiate debates about the shape-shifting nature of creative labor.

This chapter examines the shifting dynamics of the magazine producer–consumer relationship within two different industrial contexts. First, it considers how media producers are making their offerings for audiences more interactive by integrating commentary, advice, photos, and more. It situates this trend in historical perspective by recalling women's magazines' tradition of “inviting readers in.” Second, it looks at an external force encroaching on magazine production: the rise of fashion blogging. It also describes the labor politics of user-generated content and goes on to discuss how various industry insiders conceptualize fashion blogging, along with industrial and organizational trends that seem to respond to this cultural movement. The chapter shows that media producers are “inviting audiences in” to numerous spaces that they have carved out within magazine-branded properties. Community chat rooms, virtual programs, and user-generated contests engage interactive consumers while supplanting the work of professional content producers. Although editors of women's magazines maintain control over these initiatives, they have unequivocally less power over fashion bloggers.