Women's magazines down the ages (original) (raw)

For a few brief weeks in 1693, the first women's magazine in British history grappled with what would become a staple ingredient of the genre: relationship problems. The Ladies' Mercury promised to answer any questions relating to "Love etc" with "the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex". All the readers had to do was send in details of puzzling male behaviour to a coffee house near St Paul's and wait for "the Ladies Society" there to crack the code, or at least come up with some bracing advice about not bothering. The Mercury lasted for just four issues and was, in a pattern that would echo down the centuries, published by a man. None the less, it was the first time that "women" as a special interest category had been defined as needing a magazine, a paper room, of their very own.

Between the Covers, an exhibition at the Women's Library, is designed to narrate how we got from the "Zeal and Softness" of the Ladies' Mercury to the screaming covers of the current crop of weekly women's magazines. These are the ones that shout gleeful accusations that Kate is fighting an incipient beer gut, or that Amy is self-harming again, and then, helpfully, draw a jabbing arrow or circle to emphasise the evidence. Drawing on the library's rich holdings of periodicals, Between the Covers endeavours to show the development of the genre in the last 300 years, from the home-making (Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, Prima) to the campaigning (Englishwoman's Journal, Spare Rib) by way of the liberating (the Freewoman, Cosmopolitan) to the plain entertaining (Peg's Paper, Heat).

Less than a century after the brief experiment that was the Ladies' Mercury, the format for the women's magazine was beginning to emerge. 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. This brought its own set of problems. Amateurs, no matter how talented, were more likely to disappear on holiday without making proper provision, or simply run out of steam. As a result, serialised novels had a knack of stopping abruptly, leaving the female reading nation wondering whether the young couple really did overcome all obstacles to their happy ending (the answer was almost certainly yes).

The moment of transformation, at which point women's magazines stopped being an elite product written and read by ladies with time on their hands, arrived in 1852 with the launch of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Here was a product targeted at a new market, the middle-class wife and mother who did most of her own housework. Edited and written by Samuel Beeton, a hyperactive young publisher and entrepreneur, the EDM developed the format that still gets played out in domestic magazines such as Essentials (tagline: "your life made easier every day"). There were columns on pets and cookery (written eventually by Sam's wife, Isabella Beeton of Household Management fame), and a strong emphasis on crafts. 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. This was accompanied by a paper pattern and detailed instructions on how to make the item at home. Thus the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was able to do that clever thing of flattering its readers' sense of themselves as fashion cognoscenti while giving them the skills and tools to approximate the effect for a fraction of the price.

The magazine also contained a problem page. Every month, "Cupid's Post Bag" featured a series of anguished letters from readers whose problems were initially confined to reluctant fiancés, bossy elder sisters and resilient freckles. In his bracing, evidently male persona of "Cupid", Beeton was not afraid to jolly his "fair young friends" out of their self-pity, telling one plump correspondent that the quickest way to lose weight was to take a job as a governess to some annoying children with "a naggy mama". By the 1870s, however, the problem pages, aspirationally retitled "Conversazione", had taken on an alarming life of their own. Instead of asking for advice about gentlemen callers who had stopped calling, readers appeared to be flooding the magazine with explicit and erotic letters about the pleasures of wearing tight corsets and spurs and the effectiveness of whipping young girls and maidservants. What started out as saucy soon toppled over into downright pornographic (if you want to read the "tight-lacing" and "whipping" issues of the magazine in the British Library today, you have to sit at a special desk of shame under the watchful eye of a librarian). Increasingly it became impossible to tell whether these were genuine letters from domestic Englishwomen or feverish fakes inserted into Cupid's post bag by none other than Cupid himself.

Quite apart from its weirdness - the contemporary equivalent would involve the letters pages of Good Housekeeping being given over to readers describing the thrills of threesomes - this process points up the characteristically porous nature of women's magazines. Just as readers became writers in the early Lady's Magazine, so today's consumer of Bella, Prima or even Grazia is urged to email her reactions to the "top stories" or vote on some pressing issue, and in doing so generates more content for the magazine. The fantasy, if not the practice (these products are, after all, put together by professional journalists), is that a reader of a women's magazine may become its co-author at any moment. What's more, although a title may present itself as tightly defined (in the rhetorical world of women's magazines, "the Cosmo girl" could never be confused with the Bella reader), there is always an anxiety that it is in fact on the point of dissolving into something else. Just as Samuel Beeton's version of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine veered perilously close to the kind of pornography circulated in gentlemen's clubs, so more recently the "lads' mags" of the 1990s have had to argue strongly that they should not be consigned to the top shelf of the newsagents. Nuts is not Knave, although the casual reader would be hard-pressed to say exactly why.

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. This was not because the ladies of the Englishwoman's Journal (and, confusingly, they were ladies - mostly the daughters of upper-middle-class men with fortunes of their own) had anything against domesticity. But they wanted to make sure that when home life failed a woman - because her father died or her brother went bankrupt - there were alternatives to the faux-genteel and poorly paid option of becoming a governess. As a kind of forerunner of Spare Rib, the Englishwoman's Journal campaigned for girls to be trained as engravers, commercial artists, and schoolteachers. 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".

And then there were the magazines for the mill and shop girls, full of fantasy-fuelling fiction involving mostly cross-class romance. In these serial novels, viscounts and sheikhs had an odd habit of hanging around places where ordinary girls might trip over them and steal their hearts. Even then, they wanted watching. A cover from a 1926 edition of Peg's Paper shows a dodgy-looking aristo with a girl in a cheap cloche hat, and underneath the words: "COULD SHE TRUST HIM?" The tone, though careful, is not remotely improving. While the mothers of these girls might have been obliged to slog through the pious homilies of the Servants' Magazine, thoughtfully provided by their employers, these economically independent young women simply wanted a sweetener for their slivers of free time. Today they would be pouring over Heat, trying to decide whether Kelly Osbourne was right to lose all that weight.

What Between the Covers reminds you again and again is that 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.

That is why the virtually identical Woman and Woman's Own were started within a few years of each other by rival companies in the 1930s. It is why, in the late 70s, National Magazines brought out Company, as a way of mopping up some of the excess appetite created by its monster market leader, Cosmopolitan. It's why, too, magazines are folded into one another when they start to fail. It happened in the 1830s when the Lady's Magazine merged with La Belle Assemblée before quietly disappearing altogether, just as it happened over a hundred years later when Harper's merged with the Queen to become Harpers & Queen. It then dropped the monarch and has reinvented itself as Harper's Bazaar.

Among these quiet, long-drawn-out euthanasias, the exhibition includes a few luxuriant flops. I was disconcerted to find that I had contributed to most of them. There was, for instance, Working Woman, an imported American title that lasted for three brief years in the mid-1980s under the legendary and slightly scary Audrey Slaughter. The magazine had a kind of fatal fissure running through it. On page after page, purposeful-looking women in business suits explained how they had got to the top in the corporate world. These articles were interspersed with pieces, some of which I wrote, on how to find a mascara that would take you from boardroom to bedroom. The thing just didn't hang together. As we know now, women who bustle around with briefcases read the Economist by day and switch to Vogue in the bath. They don't need a hybrid that tries to do both. (Having said this, it always seems extraordinary that Marie Claire and now Grazia manage to solder pieces on Darfur together with an account of Madonna's divorce. In any other context, this would surely count as a gross lapse of taste.) The other flop featured in the exhibition is Riva, which lasted eight expensive weeks before bowing to the (at the time) inevitable conclusion that "glossy" and "weekly" were not adjectives that could coexist in the same sentence.

Yet other parts of the show remind one that, for all their emphasis on nowness and newness, women's magazines can only develop at the same rate as the culture itself, which means unevenly. A computer screen offers the chance to take a 1978 Cosmopolitan quiz entitled "How Liberated Are You?", which includes questions both quaint - "Is it right that more men than women go to university?" - and bang up-to-date - "Do you agree that women are expected to juggle too many roles?" As always, I couldn't work out the scoring system and left Between the Covers unable to say for sure whether I was liberated or not.

What will happen to women's magazines in the future is unclear. History suggests that they do well in a recession, with more launches during the difficult period of 1870-1900 than at any other time. 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. Perhaps the most important consideration is the way that, over the last 20 years, newspapers have increasingly colonised the tone, subjects and even formats of women's magazines. 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.