1. Women’s Magazine
Understanding Women's Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readerships. Contributors: Anna Gough-Yates - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2003.

2. How can we understand women’s magazines?
On a textual level, analyse the ideological content
Are best approached through an analysis of their conditions of production

3. Women’s magazines
Women’s magazines were largely studied by feminist scholars
They have found out that media reinforce gender differences and inequalities in contemporary society
media representations are seen as a key site through which oppressive feminine identities are constructed and disseminated.
In these terms those working in media production are seen as conspiring in the promotion of both capitalism and patriarchy.
Classically, then, feminist critiques of the media industries portray them as ideologically manipulative - and the role of the critic is seen as highlighting and challenging their system of domination.

4. The women's magazine industry is understood as a monolithic meaning-producer, circulating magazines that contain 'messages' and 'signs' about the nature of femininity that serve to promote and legitimate dominant interests.
Early feminist accounts of women's magazines (and their interpretation of the relationship between the texts and their readers' self-perception) were concerned with the ways that magazines offered 'unreal', 'untruthful' or 'distorted' images of women

5. These studies, therefore, called for more 'positive' images of women, ones that were more in line with the ethos and ideals of the feminist movement
From this perspective, women's magazines were seen as a powerful force for the construction and legitimation of gender inequalities.
In these terms, women's magazines did not simply offer their readers innocent pleasure - they were a key site for the development of a self-identity that undermined women's essential, 'real' feminine identities.

6. Both Friedan and Tuchman presented women's magazines as pernicious and alienating, as texts that worked to estrange and separate women from both one another and from their 'true' selves.
The media (and implicitly those involved in their production), therefore, were presented as a 'problem' for the women's movement - a 'problem' to which Friedan and Tuchman offered similar solutions.
Both authors concluded their studies by advocating the 'liberation' of women's magazine readerships through the 'enlightening' force of feminism. And this, they hoped, would ultimately sweep away the women's magazine in its contemporary (and lamentably patriarchal) form.

7. The late 1970s saw a shift away from conceiving women's magazines simply in terms of their 'negative' or 'positive' images of women.
Instead, moving beyond the liberal feminist perspectives advanced by Friedan and Tuchman, many critics found a more sophisticated theoretical model in the work of the neo-Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser (1970).
Influenced by Althusser's challenging reworking of the Marxist notion of ideology, many feminist authors began to suggest that the representations of women prevalently offered in women's magazines were not simply 'ideological' chimera, but had repercussions in women's lives that were both concrete and material

8. The significance of Althusser's work lies in his insistence that ideology is not just a set of illusory ideas, or a form of mental state or consciousness.
Instead, he understands ideology as having material form, existing as something that is carried out by groups and institutions in society.
In order for ideology to be effective, Althusser argues, the people living this imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence must engage in rituals and practices. These, he contends, are ideologically inscribed into the 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (ISAs) of society.
These institutions work to form people as subjects of ideology. They also ensure that people place (and understand) themselves in terms of ideological frameworks.

9. Feminist media critics who employed Althusser's model in their analyses of women's magazines believed that women would recognize themselves in terms of the ideological frameworks generated within the texts (see Glazer, 1980; Leman, 1980; Winship, 1978). The representations of femininity in women's magazines, therefore, were seen as 'naturalizing' an ideologically charged image of women and their place in society
Consequently, these texts were seen as instruments of domination that contributed to the overall subordination of women's 'real' identities (Hermes, 1997:223).

10. the strength of this 'Althusserian' model of analysis lay in its capacity to move away from the earlier obsession with 'positive' and 'negative' images of femininity. Instead, greater recognition was given to the place of women's magazines in the wider universe of cultural politics, and better attention was given to their role in fixing and containing feminine identities.
At the same time, however, these approaches were not without their flaws.
As subsequent studies observed, the implications of accounts informed by Althusser's ideas were that women's magazines were essentially 'closed' texts that imprisoned their women readers within a dominant set of ideologies.
For some, such an approach offered an overly pessimistic account of readers' relationships with their magazines, reducing the text to little more than an agent in the service of patriarchal capitalism

11. Gramiscian approach:Gramsci's notions of 'civil society' and the production of hegemony were of particular interest. For many theorists they allowed women's magazines to be conceived of as an arena of political contest rather than simply a site of ideological manipulation.
Generally, Gramsci conceives of hegemony as a situation in which a class or class faction is able to secure a moral, cultural, intellectual (and thereby political) leadership in society through an ongoing process of ideological struggle and compromise.
Hegemony, therefore, is not a 'given'. Rather, it is a process requiring strategies of accommodation in which a degree of 'space' is accorded to oppositional ideas and interests.

12. Hence hegemony is understood as a 'compromise equilibrium' - though it is an equilibrium that ultimately works to articulate the interests of subordinate groups to those of the dominant (Gramsci, 1971:161).
According to Gramsci, this is achieved in the realm of what he calls 'civil society'. This is an aggregation of social institutions that includes trade unions, religious organizations, the media and all the other organizations that are formed outside the parameters of the more coercive state-funded organizations and bureaucracies.
In employing a Gramscian framework, therefore, women's magazines could be conceived as constituent in the play of dominant and subordinate interests that took place within the realm of 'civil society'. As such, magazines were seen as a site where women's oppression was debated and negotiated, rather than merely reinforced.

13. Sandra Hebron's study of Jackie and Woman's Own (1983) was one of the first to adopt this approach. Hebron argued that whilst ideology played a crucial role in maintaining women's subordinate position in society, women's magazines constituted a site where marked elements of ideological negotiation were discernible.
Janice Winship took a similar line. Winship's influential work on the changing contours of the British women's magazine market from the 1950s to the 1980s attempted to pursue the full implications of Gramscian theory.
In her key study, Inside Women's Magazines (1987), Winship examined the shifting content of women's magazines in relation to wider changes in the social position of women in modern Britain.
From the late 1960s, Winship argued, the rise of the women's movement brought with it a growth in magazine coverage of political issues, including those previously dismissed as unacceptably 'feminist' (Winship, 1987:92).

14. She asserted, however, that women's magazines still adopted a characteristically 'pragmatic' approach to such issues.
So, while the magazines appeared to offer solutions to women's socio-economic oppression, this was essentially a superficial resolution, which effectively worked to block perspectives deemed radical or 'too controversial'.
This ideological work, Winship contended, was accomplished through women's magazines' characterization of gender inequality as an issue to be resolved by the individual acting in their everyday lives rather than as a deep-rooted problem that demanded wide-ranging social transformation.
Thus, whilst appearing to engage with questions of political liberation, women's magazines actually inhibited its realization by emphasizing a 'post-feminist' individual whose life could be 'whatever you, the individual, make of it' (Winship, 1987:149-50).