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Women's magazines (are they really just for women?)

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  • Women's magazines (are they really just for women?)

    A bit of an unusual choice of publication for me to write about, I know, but just in case you do find any women's magazines from the DYR era... My late mother not surprisingly used to read them back in our decades of relevance (well, why else would she buy them for?) As she was more mature in her years, she often went for Chat, Take a Break and My Weekly for over ten years, but also sometimes she went for Woman and Woman's Own; she often went for DC Thomson publications as they catered more for the middle-aged person than IPC or Bauer does. Just like today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper, it seems to me that this week's women's magazine is actually next week's doctor's surgery or hairdresser's read-while-you-wait publication before your name is called. One glimpse to an average Woman's Own and one sees the sexism before oneself - the models on the fashion pages are enough to get excited about no less - here she is in leggings; here she is wearing a denim skirt; here she is wanting a permanent contract with a modelling agency, etc.

    The agony aunt pages (the Virginia Ironside era at least) are full of letters from women with one thing on their mind in which ironically, they always seem to think that it is only men think of it all the time; and the medical pages are probably the reason why women live longer than men, and also the indication that women are more likely to visit the doctor if they have anything wrong with them. (I think I know why they are called "Agony" Aunts methinks). Remember the TV Times (when it was ITV and Channel 4 only) when they had Katie Boyle before Dr Miriam Stoppard replaced her circa 1988? My mother had even kept the edition of Woman's Own dated the week that I was born for goodness sake - it was only 14p when I was born and I was only eight pounds back then myself.

    My point is that it is not just women that needs TLC; men do as well. We have just had International Men's Day on 19th November; such a fuss is made of its female counterpart in March. Aren't we supposed to be equal in society? Personally, I wouldn't mind a male version of these magazines. Not some sexist rubbish like Nuts or Zoo but literally a male version of those magazines, or would that be far too feminine, I wonder? If I had problems with relationships, or wanted to know about medical issues if I was ill, then hiding it inside women-only publications isn't going to do much good, especially if a couple consists of both a man and a woman - it does take two to tango, doesn't it? Thank goodness for Relate, the Samaritans and medical dictionaries. But then again, I have purchased a few women's magazines myself from the 1970s and 1980s on eBay for the benefit of how life was back then, and what do we get on the back cover? Adverts for Rothmans and John Player Special cigarettes, contradicting the health messages inside the book. If we're lucky, the back page advert would be for Plumb's stretch covers a la a 22p My Weekly in the latter half of 1986. Make up your mind!

    It also makes me think that readers of Viz are also readers of women's magazines, hence the Top Tip parodies; it made me think how on earth do these women readers discover that these tips actually work - do they have a science laboratory in their kitchen trying all these out, or did they actually happen to find all this out by accident, I wonder? My Weekly was in the family home for so many years that I thought that Life and the Wadhams was the next big thing after Coronation Street, just before we get to page 54 and the Between Ourselves page, and the cat ad dog cartoon caption. As a man I have found them almost too informative, and in many ways, the health pages are just as much relevant to males as to females. It does make me think that this is why men are often embarrassed to visit the doctor when they find something wrong with them, and it shouldn't be like this. Why should I have been embarrassed when I took Textiles as a GCSE option - something associated more with females such as sewing? It's a shame that DC Thomson had closed the Weekly News down - I know it was a newspaper, but still...

    They do make good reading though, even if they are slightly biased...

    I've everything I need to keep me satisfied
    There's nothing you can do to make me change my mind
    I'm having so much fun
    My lucky number's one
    Ah! Oh! Ah! Oh!

  • #2
    My Mother used to get Woman's Own once in awhile, usually for a recipe I think (could be wrong). About all I ever noticed about most of these magazines was the use of the word 'perfect' over and over, especially on the cover. I think I'm allergic to the word and thus most of these magazines... look through once, read maybe one or two articles, and then out they go. I love magazines, but mostly went in for music related and 'cult' tv things. I have a small number of '60s fashion magazines to go with old Rave, Pop Weekly, and Beat Instrumental I got into collecting for awhile.
    My virtual jigsaws: https://www.jigsawplanet.com/beccabear67/Original-photo-puzzles

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    • #3
      Yeah mum buys womans own all the time cant remember a time when she didnt buy it.

      Now and again id read stories from it too.
      FOR THE HONOUR OF GRAYSKULL

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      • #4
        I have a collection of Jackie, Look Now, New Woman and Just Seventeen/J17 from the 80s and 90s. I went off New Woman as it was totally focused on sex and became so boring. I also liked Company. I started to buy a few 1970s magazines from vintage fairs, and I did a comparison between several Cosmopolitan magazines from 2022, 2000, 1985 and 1975 and they really did decline in quality articles as time went by. Though I don't bemoan the demise of smoking adverts! Magazines had short stories in them back then. Now it's all about celebrity rubbish. They really went downhill whereas in the earlier days they were more balanced. I miss the good magazines, online is not the same.

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        • #5
          I don't know if my Mum still buys magazines, I remember she complained a few years ago that the ones she used to read had either stopped being printed or had too much celebrity gossip in them!

          Family Circle was one she used to read, along with Bella & Prima.

          As well as the usual recipes, household hints & sewing patterns they used to have real life stories in them, which were often hard going.
          The Trickster On The Roof

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          • #6
            When my parents used to shop at Sainsbury's Broad Marsh Shopping Centre (the store closed in 1994, while the shopping centre closed in around 2017), I used to see Family Circle along with Living magazine perched at the checkouts in around 1986, priced 65p (displayed along with the chocolate bars which tempted youngsters, no doubt). The magazines looked as if they had as many pages as the Argos catalogues did although not quite as many - they didn't look as thin as Woman's Own and other magazines which around 62 pages or so inside. In recent years I always think of Family Circle as a plastic tub of biscults given at Christmas.
            I've everything I need to keep me satisfied
            There's nothing you can do to make me change my mind
            I'm having so much fun
            My lucky number's one
            Ah! Oh! Ah! Oh!

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by George 1978 View Post
              When my parents used to shop at Sainsbury's Broad Marsh Shopping Centre (the store closed in 1994, while the shopping centre closed in around 2017), I used to see Family Circle along with Living magazine perched at the checkouts in around 1986, priced 65p (displayed along with the chocolate bars which tempted youngsters, no doubt). The magazines looked as if they had as many pages as the Argos catalogues did although not quite as many - they didn't look as thin as Woman's Own and other magazines which around 62 pages or so inside. In recent years I always think of Family Circle as a plastic tub of biscults given at Christmas.
              I used to get confused as well by Family Circle! My Mum used to keep old ones for the recipes, including one from 1975 which had a cigarette advert with some ABBA lookalikes getting out of a car with cigarettes in their hands, I'm not sure if it even had a heath warning.
              The Trickster On The Roof

              Comment


              • #8
                When the Scaffold sung their 1967 song Thank U Very Much [sic] (the song which was made even more famous as a result of the 1980s Cadbury's Roses adverts), they mentioned "Family Circle" in the lyrics - I wonder whether they were referring to the biscults or the women's magaine of the same name?

                Regarding the cigarette advert from 1975 (which sounds like Rothmans), I don't think that any members of ABBA smoked either now or then - it could have been on the back of Sweden's 1974 Eurovision win, and ABBA being at the prime. One point to make is that the cigarettes were probably not Swedish, and I believe that the laws against smoking in Sweden back in 1975 were different to the ones in the UK back then. A year or so back I did some research into tobacco advertising (usually on the back pages of women's magazines, but also in newspapers), and I am certain that it was in around mid-1971 when they started to put a white strip at the bottom of the advertising, usually a one-line statement saying: "every packet contains a government health warning". This seemed to graduate towards the end of the 1970s to: "smoking damages your health" with "Low to Middle Tar" above that, and "Chief Medical Officers" or something similar at the bottom.

                Certainly by the late 1980s the goverment health warnings were a lot more assertive and very much to the point, and had mentioned: "smoking can harm your unborn baby", and also the extremely assertive: "smoking kills". Meanwhile, companies like Benson and Hedges used abstract advertising with their gold-coloured packet, and Silk Cut always used their purple silk trademark to advertise their product. John Player Special advertised on the back page of My Weekly circa October 1986 with "Black in a Tick", meaning that gold, purple and black were three main colours associated with cigarette brands. Ironically, I have never smoked, thank goodness, but my late mother died of lung cancer due to the filthy habit, years before her time.

                Someone found a decades old magazine in their dentists' waiting room, and the main thing that made it dated was indeed the cigarette advertising on the back page - it was a Sunday newspaper magaine suuplement from 1974.
                Last edited by George 1978; 07-04-2024, 23:38.
                I've everything I need to keep me satisfied
                There's nothing you can do to make me change my mind
                I'm having so much fun
                My lucky number's one
                Ah! Oh! Ah! Oh!

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by George 1978 View Post
                  When the Scaffold sung their 1967 song Thank U Very Much [sic] (the song which was made even more famous as a result of the 1980s Cadbury's Roses adverts), they mentioned "Family Circle" in the lyrics - I wonder whether they were referring to the biscults or the women's magaine of the same name?

                  Regarding the cigarette advert from 1975 (which sounds like Rothmans), I don't think that any members of ABBA smoked either now or then - it could have been on the back of Sweden's 1974 Eurovision win, and ABBA being at the prime. One point to make is that the cigarettes were probably not Swedish, and I believe that the laws against smoking in Sweden back in 1975 were different to the ones in the UK back then. A year or so back I did some research into tobacco advertising (usually on the back pages of women's magazines, but also in newspapers), and I am certain that it was in around mid-1971 when they started to put a white strip at the bottom of the advertising, usually a one-line statement saying: "every packet contains a government health warning". This seemed to graduate towards the end of the 1970s to: "smoking damages your health" with "Low to Middle Tar" above that, and "Chief Medical Officers" or something similar at the bottom.

                  Certainly by the late 1980s the goverment health warnings were a lot more assertive and very much to the point, and had mentioned: "smoking can harm your unborn baby", and also the extremely assertive: "smoking kills". Meanwhile, companies like Benson and Hedges used abstract advertising with their gold-coloured packet, and Silk Cut always used their purple silk trademark to advertise their product. John Player Special advertised on the back page of My Weekly circa October 1986 with "Black in a Tick", meaning that gold, purple and black were three main colours associated with cigarette brands. Ironically, I have never smoked, thank goodness, but my late mother died of lung cancer due to the filthy habit, years before her time.

                  Someone found a decades old magazine in their dentists' waiting room, and the main thing that made it dated was indeed the cigarette advertising on the back page - it was a Sunday newspaper magaine suuplement from 1974.
                  I'm fairly sure it wasn't ABBA in the advert I mentioned, just some models who happened to look a bit like them!

                  Rothmans used to have a hand holding a packet, with the sleeve from a uniform in view. Certainly by the 1980s most adverts were quite abstract, though Marlboro seemed to stick with views of rural America well into the 1990s, with a slogan like "Welcome to Marlboro Country".
                  The Trickster On The Roof

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    A lot of IPC Magazines such as TV Times used to have Rothmans on their back pages in the mid 1980s, although my family didn't usually get that magazine back then. The adverts had to be abstract because the ASA wouldn't have allowed them to advertise otherwise.
                    I've everything I need to keep me satisfied
                    There's nothing you can do to make me change my mind
                    I'm having so much fun
                    My lucky number's one
                    Ah! Oh! Ah! Oh!

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Family Circle magazine rings a bell also; again, recipes, also craft type articles as well.
                      My virtual jigsaws: https://www.jigsawplanet.com/beccabear67/Original-photo-puzzles

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                      • #12
                        cishet guys checking out cishet girls shouldn't be different than the reverse. Maybe as DV declines, it won't be seen as such anymore. JMO. YMMV.
                        https://rewoundradio.com/

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