Women’s Magazines – Pre War

The first publications solely aimed at a female audience are believed to have appeared towards the end of the 17^th Century.  The primary periodical of any note was ‘The Ladies’ Mercury’ which was published in February 1693 by bookseller John Dunton. This was a double sided sheet which promised to respond to ‘all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour and humour of the female sex’. It was only printed for four weeks but was perhaps the first real acknowledgment of the need to produce publications designed for women alone.

The term ‘magazine’ itself was not actually used until 1731 and therefore the pioneering women’s magazine was technically ‘The Lady’s Magazine’, brought out in 1770. Though the magazine featured the fashion, educational and domestic advice that we might expect from this period, its main concern was for the ‘adornment of its readers’ minds’. It introduced visual elements and contained amusing, often scandalous, fiction or autobiography, full of stories concerning adultery, suicide and heroic men – not dissimilar to the shocking stories found in today’s ‘real life’ women’s magazines. ‘The Lady’s Magazine’ was aimed at filling the leisured days of upper-class women and ran monthly for seventy-seven years.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, changes in the position of women and of society itself had a major impact on women’s publications. The rise of industrial capitalism from the 1780’s onwards created clear distinctions between the working class, the now sizeable middle class professionals and the upper class aristocrats. Janice Winship states that ‘the workplace became completely separate from the home’, with women now associated with domesticity and childcare. As a result of this the content of women’s magazines changed.

Recognising the new market of domestic, middle class housewives, Samuel Beeton created the ‘English Woman’s Domestic Magazine’ in 1852. This publication contained much more practical information than its predecessors, regularly featuring articles on treating illness, gardening and cooking good family meals, highlighting the need for ‘domestic virtues’.

The ‘English Woman’s Domestic Magazine’ laid out a blueprint for the modern magazine industry. It marked the beginning for publications aimed specifically at different groups and classes of women and its rapid rise in circulation, from 25,000 in 1854 to over 50,000 in 1860, proved that there was much wealth to be gained from the female niche. This increased circulation also led to higher levels of literacy amongst working class women as well as great improvement in the mass publishing of magazines. The rise in production costs led to such magazines needing to find further sources of revenue and consequently more and more magazines began to turn to advertising. The other notable female magazine of the time that benefited from advertising was ‘The Lady’, which was described by The Times journalist Rupert Morris as an ‘Exchange and Mart for nannies’.

By the twentieth century the number of magazines available had more than doubled. Up until this point however, women’s magazines had been reasonably formal. The magazines ‘My Weekly’ and ‘Woman’s Weekly’ of 1910 and 1911 respectively, established a much more personal touch, which we now see in most modern publications. Journalist Mary Grieve believed that before the war women’s magazines were the ‘Cinderella of the British publishing industry’. It was the World Wars however, that led to an explosion in their reputation.   



Sources:
Women's magazines, 1693-1968 by Cynthia L. White
Understanding women's magazines by Anna Gough-Yates
Women of the press in nineteenth-century Britain by Barbara Onslow        
www.britannica.com                    
 http://www.victorianpage.com/VictorianPage-Ladiespage-womensmagazines.html