Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 23

Writing Women’s Magazines
Women’s weekly magazines have, until recently, been seen as a negative
influence on their readers because of their supposedly anti-feminist agenda. With
the shift in focus from text to audience, however, researchers have begun to
recognise the different ways in which magazines can be interpreted by readers,
and increasingly that readers appear to participate in the development and content
of the magazines. In postmodern thinking, the divisions between producers and
consumers have become blurred and contemporary women’s weeklies look as if
they have been written by their readers and in some cases editors explicitly claim
that this is so. ^readers are playing a greater role in the magazines, then researchers
have to consider that the content of such publications may be chosen by the readers,
rather than by the editors, and that readers are involved in the struggles over notions
of identity and femininity in the magazines’ pages. In this paper, we explore the
participation of readers in women’s weekly magazines from the perspectives of
both readers and journalists, using interviews and observation. We conclude that
although readers do have some input into the magazines, the appearance of
participation is largely an illusion created by the magazines to differentiate them
from the old style, didactic, ‘us and them’ magazines of the 1970s and 80s. Despite
appearances to the contrary, editorial control over magazines has not been ceded
to readers.

Researching women’s magazines

Women’s magazines have been explored and analysed by feminist scholars
since Friedan’s (1963) critique of American magazines in the 1960s. The Feminine
M ystique set the tone for subsequent work on magazines and rarely has anything
positive been written about them since. Studies on women’s magazines often result
in the feminist author focusing on what she sees as the restricting femininity and
dulling material presented in the glossy pages. Writers such as Ferguson (1983),
Hebron (1983), Tuchman (1978) and King and Stott (1977) despaired over the
assumed lack of feminist awareness of (always other) readers, who would not
have the perception to see through the magazines’ anti-feminist agenda. But actual
readers were never consulted about how they read women’s magazines. The studies
mentioned above used content analysis as a method of researching titles such as
Woman, Woman s Own, Jackie and Cosmopolitan, and reader positions were inferred
from the content. The discursive space of a woman’s magazine was seen as closed
to the readers themselves and occupied only by editorial and advertising.
The emphasis on content was in accordance with the prevailing knowledge
and theoretical perspectives of the 1970s and 80s, when audience positions were