ABSTRACT
Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?
A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female.
A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |14 pages
Introduction
part |42 pages
The Making of the Magazine, 1800–50
chapter |19 pages
The ‘Fair Sex' and the Magazine: The Early Ladies' Journals
chapter |9 pages
The Queen, the Beauty and the Woman Writer
chapter |12 pages
Family and Mothers' Magazines: The 1830s and 1840s
part |55 pages
The Beetons: The Domestic English Woman and the Lady, 1850–80
chapter |12 pages
The Beetons and the Englishwoman–s Domestic Magazine, 1852–60
chapter |18 pages
The Female Body and the Domestic Woman, 1860–80
chapter |23 pages
Re-Making the Lady: the Queen
part |42 pages
New Woman, New Journalism, the 1880s and 1890s