ISBN-13: 9780415049207 / Angielski / Twarda / 1996 / 256 str.
ISBN-13: 9780415049207 / Angielski / Twarda / 1996 / 256 str.
The woman's magazine has been central to popular reading throughout the 20th century, but the history of the form has been almost completely neglected. How did it come to occupy this place? How did it develop its familiar elements - the agony aunt, the fashion plate, the repeated promise to transform the reader into a desirable woman? Did it empower or disempower readers in the process of defining themselves as gendered and sexual women? This study addresses a range of such questions as it charts the history of the British woman's magazine through the 19th century. It is simultaneously a chronological story, a set of detailed case studies, and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. The author argues that the two elements in the term woman's magazine are dynamically related. The magazine has been shaped by its association with women as readers; the meaning of femininities - whether of the domestic woman, the fashionable lady or the romancing girl - have been made in and through the magazine.