Some more research on thread topic:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ls-300-years-of-women-s-magazines-968443.html
And this:
https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2158&context=etd
Quote:
"The Evolution of the Woman on Magazine Covers of the Early Twentieth Century
The woman, as presented by mass media, has taken many forms and has evolved over time. Of particular importance in this study is how women are projected to various audiences on magazine covers. The Girl on the Magazine Cover, a book written by ******, examines the evolution of the woman on the front page of this particular print media over time. According to *****, it is the early twentieth century that laid the foundation for the perception and acceptance of the modern day woman. …Media stereotypes of women first emerged not in mass media from the 1970s to the 1990s but in mass media of the first three decades of the century.. . .Current media
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the magazine industry quickly evolved into a business of selling the publication not only to readers but also selling these readers to advertisers. The best way for a magazine to accomplish this business, and thus make a successful name for itself, was to grab its audience’s attention. This was done through the magazine cover. The cover “…declared the magazine’s personality and promise. It also made a statement about the intended reader.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, photography in newspapers was beginning to become more regularly seen but was still far from the norm. In contrast, the magazine industry as a whole continued to use illustration on their front covers simply because the topics discussed within a magazines’ pages were not dealing with reality but rather idealism.
At the turn of the century, Ladies Home Journal did a series of covers intended to represent the “American Woman.” “In the artists’ tableaux, ideological messages emerged less from the figures of individual women than from the entire setting. The meaning of the ‘American woman’ had to do not so much with her looks, but rather with her location and context.” At the beginning the twentieth century, this magazine was informing its audience that the roles women played in American society were expanding.
The onset of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of another image of the American woman on the covers of many popular magazines. This image was known as the Gibson Girl, a simple pen and ink sketch of a woman that sometimes took the form of a portrait while other times an entire person. This image “…looked quite similar from one drawing to the next, and this consistency made her the first visual stereotype of women in American mass media. Her rapid rise to fame created a blueprint for the commercial uses of such a stereotype.” The Gibson Girl represented beauty to the American public, thereby encouraging women that having beauty was their greatest asset. The image of the Gibson Girl easily made its way from the pages of many magazines into the popular American culture of the time, promoting new ideas on gender roles. This woman was a rather strong female who was well established financially and was often times seen in some type of conflict with a male. “The strong will of women was a recurring theme in Gibson’s commentary on turn-of-the-century gender relations.”
Other portrayals of women in magazines during this period of the early 1900s also portrayed women in more progressive and nontraditional roles. Many magazine readers experienced on magazine covers for the first time women engaging in outdoor activities like horse back riding and canoeing rather than sitting in the parlor sipping tea. In addition to this modern view of women was the image of young ladies as active athletes and college students. “Whether or not she was portrayed as educated or athletic, the magazine cover girl of this era was almost always shown outside the home, a rhetorical shift that acknowledged real change in women’s social roles.” It is important to note that a magazine’s audience played a very important role in determining what image of the modern, American woman was projected in the early 1900s. In many of the magazines where the readership was primarily male, the image of the American woman was more subdued and traditional, with the woman appearing more demur. Likewise, in magazines targeted primarily to women, the American female was a great deal more progressive. “On magazine covers and at the movies, the idea of a new sexually free American
woman was presented as a threat to men, and she was captured in at least three new visual ‘types’ of the American woman.
Mass media of the early 1900s to 1920s were threatened by these three progressive movements of socialism, immigration, and feminism. Of major focus in the area of feminism was the suffrage movement and many “radical” publications during this time took on the responsibility to again shape the idea of the modern American woman. The image seen on these magazine covers portrayed a woman as a heroic figure from a Greek myth. “Artists working for women’s rights periodicals did not invent new imagery to visualize the New Woman who was a suffragist; instead, they used familiar and comforting notions of womanhood to make suffrage seem natural and right.”
Media, and magazines specifically, continued to be a voice for women’s right to vote as well as an advocate for nontraditional gender roles as the United States entered World War I. At the outbreak of war, however, the American popular culture turned sharply back to the traditional image of the woman. For example, “…magazines of the day made clear that a woman’s noblest wartime calling was that of mother, whether her children were young adults serving their country or youngsters who represented the future of democracy.” This value in the traditional role of women extended through media and pop culture well after the end of the war, making the introduction of the progressive woman at the turn of the century all but forgotten.
With this revival of the traditional woman image seen throughout American media, came an emphasis and focus on the American family. Images of both feminity and masculinity graced the covers of many popular magazines at the time. The family was a symbol of strength during this time and through the persuasion of the magazine cover, promoted twentieth-century commercial and social lifestyle.66 The magazine cover was a powerful tool.
Cover imagery of this era expressed—for the first time in media that were truly national—ideas about gender and about class, gradually diffusing those identity tensions by blending them into a larger notion about what it meant to be a ‘typical American’ in the modern era.
Break
Results:
"Research Question 3 asked how the distribution of themes on the men’s magazines studied compared with those from the women’s magazines.
Findings in this area were significant. Both groups’ number one theme was celebrity news. Further, fashion ranked third in each group as well. The second most popular blurb theme for the women’s magazines was beauty/body image, which appeared nearly six times as often as the same category in the men’s magazines studied.
Family oriented themes occurred over six times more often on women’s magazines than on men’s magazines. Health themes were almost twice as frequent in these female magazines as opposed to the male magazines. Home-themed blurbs occurred 27 more times in the ladies’ publications studied than they did in the men’s.
Themes that were much more prevalent in the men’s magazines were celebrity infatuation, which occurred three times as often than in women’s magazines; news, which occurred almost five times more than in the ladies’ magazines; and leisure, which occurred eight times more frequently than it did in the women’s magazines researched. These findings certainly signify that women are being cultivated to focus on physical beauty, family, the home, and health infinitely more than are men. Further, men are being cultivated from men’s publications to crave the ideal celebrity, focus on news, and make time for leisure far more than are woman from their women’s publications."
