Family Circle And Women’s Day
2021; Volume: 22; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/jmm.2021.0021
ISSN2576-7895
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoFamily Circle And Women’s Day Susan Keith (bio) Scholars of magazines know how personally important a magazine can feel— how it can bring a person into a community, fuel a lifelong passion, or even help to shape a nascent identity. The editor of the Journal of Magazine Media, Kevin Lerner, wrote a letter from the editor about this in the Fall 2020 issue of the journal. Susan Keith, currently the president of AEJMC, this journal’s sponsoring organization, saw that letter and suggested collecting short essays from scholars about the magazines that most affected them. A call went out on LISTSERVs and social media, and more than a dozen scholars—ranging from graduate students to emeriti, magazine specialists and not—responded with their stories. In the pre-internet-era Deep South, where would a girl who attended a fundamentalist Christian high school learn about sex and sexuality? For me, it was mostly from the pages of Family Circle and Woman’s Day, bought at the supermarket by my grandmother for the cake recipes. Family Circle, published from 1932 to 2019, and Woman’s Day, started in 1931 and still with us, are two of the “Seven Sisters” of US women’s magazine titles, along with McCall’s (1873–2002), Ladies’ Home Journal (1873– 2016), Redbook (1903–2019), and the still-published Good Housekeeping (founded in 1885) and Better Homes and Gardens (started in 1922). Both Family Circle and Woman’s Day were originally free publications distributed by supermarket chains. Woman’s Day was originally called the A&P Menu Sheet, and Family Circle could be found in Piggly Wiggly, Sanitary, and Reeves stores. After converting to paid circulation in 1937 (Woman’s Day) and 1946 (Family Circle), the magazines’ circulation grew steadily, to a peak of 20 million and 21 million, respectively, by the late 1980s. When Meredith Corp. closed Family Circle in 2019, it had a circulation of about 4 million. In the first half of 2021, Hearst’s Woman’s Day had a paid circulation of about 2.3 million, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. [End Page 1] The magazines’ target audience was adult women—tacitly middle class, white, and suburban—not teens. But even in the 1970s, they carried articles from which a careful tween or teen reader could learn, such as “Helping Children Deal with Sexual Feelings” (Woman’s Day, February 1975), “Is There Anything Left to Tell Your Daughter about Sex?” (Woman’s Day, February 3, 1978), and “What Husbands Wish Their Wives Knew about Sex” (Family Circle, April 24, 1978)—right next to the casserole recipes. Particularly memorable was the March 1973 edition of Woman’s Day, which contained a five-page feature review by frequent women’s magazine contributor Eileen Herbert Jordan of Robert C. Sorensen’s survey-based book Adolescent Sexuality in Contemporary America (1973). That book—based on what Herbert Jordan refers to as “one of the frankest questionnaires ever written on the subject of sex”—revealed that only 48 percent of the six hundred respondents to the forty-page survey, who were all thirteen to nineteen years old, were virgins. The quotations from interviews with some of the teens, reprinted in the review, and the notion that one could report on sexual behavior without moral judgment were so fascinating that decades later I accurately remembered the color of the magazine cover, golden yellow, and the rather smarmy stock photos of teens published with the article. That means that the issue likely stayed for years in the stack of women’s magazines my grandmother kept as a recipe archive, thanks to the cover image: a dessert called “chocolate coronet” keyed to an article with the oddly moralistic title “Heavenly Chocolate: That Tempter of All Time—Out to Fell the Mighty with One Sin-sational Dessert after Another.” The information about sex and sexuality that I received from these women’s magazines was decidedly heteronormative and assumed a certain knowledge of male anatomy that I—ahem—lacked. But the magazines offered, as magazines often do, a perspective beyond the confines of my world. By the time I got to college, most of what I knew about the mechanics of...
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