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1: Making the Magazine
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
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1 Making the Magazine Three Hundred Years in Print What are women’s magazines? Their material attributes—sleek, glossy pages, vividly hued images, and consistent dimensions—no doubt distinguish them from other mediated forms of culture and communication. According to media scholar Lynda Dyson, magazines are carefully designed to meet the perceived needs of readers; for instance, the “feel of glossies connote[s] luxury and pleasure, despite the fact that their sale price is relatively low.” Dyson also explains that their size and portability presumably encourage leisure-time consumption and pass-along readership.1 Of course, it would be technologically deterministic—not to mention myopic—to overlook the immaterial elements that define the magazine. In the 1970s, Raymond Williams used the concept of cultural form to differentiate the technological aspects of a medium (in this case, television) from its social praxis and human affordances. Contemporary scholars have adopted Williams’s idea to think critically about the socially constructed, intangible properties of a medium—the magazineness of the magazine, if you will. Continuities in the cultural form and function of women’s magazines can be traced to the American Victorian era—if not earlier. Indeed, the first magazine targeted exclusively to a female audience was the seventeenth-century London fortnightly the Ladies’ Mercury, which promised to answer “all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress, and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or widows.”2 By the next century’s turn, women’s magazines had become intricately woven into the fabric of Western social life, both creating and reflecting the political 22 . chapter 1 realities of early nineteenth-century women. Many of the features and approaches adopted during this era—advice columns, an appeal to feminine identity, fashion recommendations, and an intimate editorial tone—remain today. And while these factors helped to identify the medium, magazines were also defined by what they were not, namely newspapers and books. As magazine historian Margaret Beetham explains, “Unlike the essay-serial, [the magazine] mixed genres and had a variety of authorial voices, but unlike that other mixed periodical form, the newspaper, it carried no ‘news.’”3 This is not to say that women’s magazines have no symbolic connection to other forms of mediated culture. Quite the contrary: as the first truly commercial medium, magazines set an early precedent for the production, distribution, and financing of media content. Such guidelines helped to shape the course of the commercial mass media system that unfolded over the twentieth century. Some of the specific magazine practices that I discuss in this chapter—selling audiences to advertisers in order to offset the sales price, targeting narrowly defined sections of the populace, and blending entertainment and advertising content—were later appropriated and built upon by the radio, television, and internet industries, among others. The historical significance of magazines thus goes far beyond their material properties. It is admittedly an oversimplification to group women’s magazines together as a coherent and monolithic category without at least acknowledging their variances. Certainly an haute couture title like Vogue, a service publication like Family Circle, and a monthly self-improvement guide like Self depart from one another in their approaches to content, audiences, advertisers, and more. Even those titles nestled within the same subcategory (media research firms typically break the genre into “women’s service,” “entertainment/celebrity,” and “beauty and fashion”) rely on distinctive features, tones, and aesthetics to communicate their unique brand personalities to audiences (and advertisers). Hence,although Martha Stewart Living,Good Housekeeping,and Ladies’ Home Journal fit under the rubric of what industry insiders call “service magazines,” they are unmistakably different.4 Notwithstanding the nuances within and across magazine categories, I share the perspective of magazine and feminist media scholars who conceptualize women’s magazines as a distinct genre. Not only is the genre concept a constructive analytical intervention into the realms of cultural production, it is also meaningful for those workers embedded inside the genre’s culture. As David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker explain in their recent book on creative labor, genres offer media workers “institutionalization and routinization in a highly uncertain interpretive production world.”5 The terms of [44.204.34.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:29 GMT) making the magazine · 23 genres, they add, are mutually constructed and continuously renegotiated. Women’s magazines, then, are a distinctive media category formed through the assumptions and activities of magazine producers, audiences, advertisers , and those of us trying to understand them within...