Everything Old Is New Again: How the “New” User-Generated Women's Magazine Takes Us Back to the Future

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Notes

Jennifer Preston, “A New Ladies’ Home Journal, Written Mostly by Readers,” New York Times, January 15, 2012, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/a-new-ladies-home-journal-written-mostly-by-readers/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.

Erik Sass, “Ladies’ Home Journal Taps User-Generated Content,” Media Daily News, January 12, 2012, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/165673/mag-bag-ladies-home-journal-taps-user-generated.html.

Susan Currie-Sivak, “Ladies’ Home Journal Ventures into Bold Crowdsourcing Experiment,” Mediashift, January 24, 2012, http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/ladies-home-journal-ventures-into-bold-crowdsourcing-experiment024; Nat Ives, “Ladies’ Home Journal Lets Readers Write the Magazine,” Ad Age, January 9, 2012, http://adage.com/article/media/ladies-home-journal-lets-readers-write-magazine/231966.

Chris O’Shea, “Ladies’ Home Journal Wants to See Just How Bad It Can Be,” Mediabistro, January 9, 2012, http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/ladies-home-journal-wants-to-see-just-how-bad-it-can-be_b50067.

See Brown comments in Amy Aronson, “Women's Magazines Go Global,” IPI Global Journalist, July–September, 2001. See also Jennifer Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

A summary of these critical positions is in Amy Aronson, “Still Reading Women's Magazines: Reconsidering the Tradition a Half Century after The Feminine Mystique,” American Journalism 27, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 31–62.

See, for example, Kathryn Shevelow, “Fathers and Daughters: Women as Readers of the Tatler,” in Gender and Readings: Essays on Readers, Texts and Context, ed. Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 106–128.

Ellen Guber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also S. Elizabeth Bird, “Seeking the Historical Audience,” in Explorations in Communication and History, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New York: Routledge, 2008), 90–106.

Dorothy Foster, “The Earliest Precursor of Our Present-Day Monthly Miscellanies,” PMLA 32, no. 1 (1917): 22–58.

Frank Luther Mott writes that “the Addisonian essay was a chief stock in trade of the eighteenth-century magazine” and also comments that “the four most important magazines [from the Revolution to the end of the eighteenth century], the Columbian Magazine and the American Museum, of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Magazine, of Boston, and the New-York Magazine,” are notable for their “eclecticism.” See Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 1: 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton, 1930), 30, 39, 41.

See Stephen Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics and an Open Press’: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 34–87. See also Peter J. Parker, “The Philadelphia Printer: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Businessman,” Business History Review 40, no. 1 (1966): 24–46.

See Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Authority, Authenticity, and the Publication of Letters by Women,” in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Goldsmith (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 24–40.

See Karen K. List, “Magazine Portrayals of Women's Role in the Early Republic,” Journalism History 13, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 64–70.

A Matrimonial Republican, “On Matrimonial Obedience,” Ladies’ Magazine and Repository of Entertaining and Instructive Knowledge, July 1792, 64–67; Anonymous, “Letter,” Weekly Visitor, or Ladies’ Miscellany, January 24, 1807, 100–101.

See, for example, B., “Thoughts on Old Maids,” Ladies Magazine and Repository of Entertaining and Instructive Knowledge, July 1792, 60–62; V., “Margery Bethel,” (American) Ladies’ Magazine, April 1828, 170–174.

V., “The Criterion of Virtue,” Weekly Visitor, or Ladies’ Miscellany, November 20, 1802, 52.

“The Respect Due to Females,” Weekly Visitor, or Ladies' Miscellany, January 8, 1803, 108; “Female Heroism,” Weekly Visitor, or Ladies' Miscellany, January 29, 1803, 109; “Female Heroism,” Weekly Visitor, or Ladies' Miscellany, July 21, 1804, 333.

Eliza, “From a Young Lady to Her Seducer,” Weekly Visitor, or Ladies’ Miscellany, April 4, 1807, 86–87.

U.R., “Letter to the Editor,” (American) Ladies’ Magazine, March 1829, 135–138.

Hale's note appears immediately after the close of U.R.'s letter, (American) Ladies’ Magazine, March 1829, 138. Laura, “Letter,” (American) Ladies’ Magazine, April 1829, 184–186.

See, for example, “Editor's Table,” Godey's Lady's Book, January 1837, 2; “Editor's Table,” Godey's Lady's Book, January 1856, 2; “Editor's Table,” Godey's Lady's Book, February 1857, 2; Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah H. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

See Okker, Our Sister Editors, 66.

Godey's Lady's Book, February 1852, 163. See also Godey's Lady's Book, September 1861, 227. Both cited in Okker, Our Sister Editors, 33.

See Amy Aronson, “Domesticity and Collective Agency: Contribution and Collaboration in America's First Successful Women's Magazine,” American Periodicals 11 (Spring 2001): 1–24.

See “America's First Feminist Magazine: Transforming the Popular to the Political,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 197–220. See also Amy Aronson, “Changing Gender through Feminist Journalism: Revising Identity in The Lily,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, ed. David Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 227–237.

Hale particularly promoted the idea that women are well suited—perhaps better suited than men—to be physicians. See Godey's Lady's Book, March 1852, 187; Godey's Lady's Book, March 1852, 228; Godey's Lady's Book, February 1857, 180. On banking, see Godey's Lady's Book, March 1852, 228.

See Elaine Showalter, “Piecing and Writing,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 222–247. See also Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 31, 42. See also Okker, Our Sister Editors, 32.

John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 36.

Tebbel and Zuckerman, 36. On Godey's significance, see also Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, Women's Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995).

See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Tanya Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Methuen, 1982).

See, for example, Tanya Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance.

Andrea M. McDonnell, Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines (London: Polity Press, 2014).

See Ien Ang, Watching “Dallas”: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985); see also Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of “Dallas” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also John Fiske, “Television: Polysemy and Popularity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 3, no. 4 (December 1986): 391–408; and John Fiske, “TV: Re-Situating the Popular in the People,” Continuum 1, no. 2 (1987): 35–39.

See Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005).

Joke Hermes, Reading Women's Magazines (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995), 10.

See David D. Brown, “From Cohesion to Competition,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce et al. (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 3–26.

These included “summonses, writs of attachment, deeds of transfer, apprentice indentures, customs receipts, surveyors’ certificates, tax assessment forms, land grants, powers of attorney, military discharge, complaints for suits in equity, recognizance appeals, commissions civil and military, post-rider oaths, special warrants, bills obligatory, mortgages for slaves … and more.” See Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 18.

See Cynthia Z. Stiverson and Gregory Stiverson, “The Colonial Retail Book Trade: Availability and Affordability of Reading Material in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Printing and Society in Early America, 45–74. See also David Paul Nord, “A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Reading and Readers in Late Eighteenth-Century New York,” American Quarterly 40, no. 1 (March 1988): 42–63.

The Lady's Museum, February 25, 1800, 1.

Robert Winans finds that “the increasing quantity and shrillness of the ‘public’ opposition to novel-reading late in the century was apparently in direct proportion to the increasing indulgence in the practice.” Robert B. Winans, “The Growth of a Novel-Reading Public in Late-Eighteenth-Century America,” Early American Literature 9, no. 3 (January 1975): 267.

Quoted in Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 1, 174.

Winans, “The Growth of a Novel-Reading Public in Late-Eighteenth-Century America,” 267.

Quoted in Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 1, 174.

Boston Weekly Magazine, May 28, 1803, 125.

D., “Hints on Reading,” Ladies Magazine and Repository of Entertaining and Instructive Knowledge, March 1793, 171–173.

Lady's Magazine and Musical Repository, January 1801, 6–11.

Lady's Magazine and Musical Repository, March 1801, 163.

D., “Hints on Reading,” 172.

See, for example, Michael Meyer, “Surface Routines: How We Read on the Web,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2008. A more critical view of the “new” decoding styles is Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

G. Keate, Esquire, Lady and Gentleman's Pocket Magazine of Literature and Polite Amusement, 1796, 232–233.

Mary Ellen Waller-Zuckerman, “‘Old Homes in a City of Perpetual Change’: Women's Magazines, 1890–1916,” Business History Review 63, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 716, 721.

Pamela Fraker, “The Hypocrisy of So-Called Women's Magazines,” Voices 2, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 20. From the left, see Ellen McCracken, Decoding Women's Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. (New York: St. Martin's, 1993); and Jennifer Nelson, Airbrushed Nation: The Lure and Loathing of Women's Magazines (New York: Seal Press, 2012). From the right, see Myrna Blyth, Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005).

Kalia Doner, “Women's Magazines: Slouching towards Feminism,” Social Policy 23, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 37–43.

Erin Duffy, Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2014), 96.

Duffy, Remake, Remodel, 97.

Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998); and Nancy Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women's Magazines (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

See Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 79–108, 109–136.

Walker, 11. Walker agreed that women's magazines entertained ideological tensions—even in the 1950s—but she attributed those competing messages to the domestic renegotiations of postwar era rather than to the form and tradition of the women's magazine itself.

See, for example, “Our Readers Write Us,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1963, 20. See also Amy Aronson, “Still Reading Women's Magazines: Reconsidering the Tradition a Half Century after The Feminine Mystique,” American Journalism 27, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 31–62.

Hermes, Reading Women's Magazines. See also Joke Hermes, “Media, Meaning and Everyday Life,” Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (1993): 493–506. International studies find similar abilities for women's magazine readers to read both critically and creatively. See, for example, Ytre-Arne Brita, “Women's Magazines and Their Readers: Experiences, Identity and Everyday Life” (PhD diss., University of Bergen, Norway, 2013).

See Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991); Dawn Currie, Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). See also Elizabeth Frazer, “Teenage Girls Reading Jackie,” Media, Culture, and Society 9 (1987): 407–425.

David Carr, “A Platform for Writers to Help Them Shine Online,” New York Times, May 26, 2014, B1.

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Notes on contributors

Amy Aronson

Amy Aronson is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, Lincoln Center.