Page 582 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Women’s Magaz nes | 1

American women’s magazines have always been a decidedly miscellaneous
form. Even the earliest versions in the 1790s contained various types of fiction,
including travelogues, short stories, poems, “observations,” parables and frag-
ments, as well as nonfiction genres from advice, to instruction, to argumentative
essays, to reportage, even music. They have always been composed of multiple
departments and carried the contributions of different writers as well.
Scholars have mapped the polyvocality of women’s magazines into the present
day, despite ever-increasing marketing sophistication over time. But opinions di-
verge sharply on how these multiple voices play for readers. Some say the many
voices all gang up to deliver the same, wrong message (whatever that message
may be). Others say they bind women in a web of opposing goals. But recently,
a number of scholars have seen the many voices as competing at times—and
have explored the openings and options that may arise from divergent ideas and
discursive competition on the page. Recent scholarship has emphasized colli-
sions between editorial commentary and fiction, feature articles and reader let-
ters, and all of these and advertising.

ComPETing inTErEsTs: oPEning oPTions
or zEro-sum gamE?
In contemporary women’s magazines, the competing voices are seen to spring
from competing interests at the heart of the enterprise itself. One the one hand,
women’s magazines seek to serve the interests of their readers. On the other, mod-
ern magazines depend on advertising to provide substantial portions of operating
revenues as well as profits. Thus, advertiser interests, too, must be satisfied or the
magazine folds. These two sets of interests are generally viewed as battling it out
in a zero-sum game: what advertisers want for women—essentially, that they
remain focused on their “jobs” as wives and mothers—is the opposite of what
women want for themselves; when advertisers win, women lose.
Formally, this was not always the case. For their first 100 years or so, there was
limited advertising in women’s magazines. They were subscription-supported
and copy came from amateur writers who contributed on a voluntary basis.
Until the rise of the mass-market magazine in the 1890s, advertising mainly oc-
cupied small boxes on back pages, leaving the bulk of the book to be dominated
by readers, writers, and editors.
The mass-market magazine model changed all that. It worked by charging
subscription prices too low to sustain production costs, let alone profits, but low
enough to be affordable to huge groups of readers of modest means nationwide.
The amateur contributors who once provided copy were thereafter relegated
mainly to roles as readers; professional writers, hired by professional editors,
with the increasing input of rising marketing departments, created most of the
content. Advertisers, eager to promote burgeoning new product lines, supported
it all in exchange for well-positioned access to the eyes and minds of masses of
women.
The standard histories say this mass-market formula was pioneered by Mun-
sey’s, a general-interest magazine, in late 1893. Owner Frank Munsey had lost