If you’ve ever been in the checkout line at any grocery store in America, then you’ve seen the glossy pages, covers adorned with gorgeous women with impossibly smooth skin, and bright colorful taglines about sex tips, work out advice, and how to get a man. Yes, it’s a women’s magazine.
Names like Glamour and Cosmo are probably the first to pop into one’s mind when one thinks of the infamous women’s magazine, but it is probably less likely that one associates politics with these magazines. In fact, the first women’s magazine, created in Philadelphia in 1792, focused not just on beauty, childcare, and recipes – staples of a women’s magazines – but also on “democracy, child labor, women’s pay, women’s legal rights and divorce” as did many other magazines created since then. Many women’s magazines are stepping back into the role of educating women on political issues and providing a forum for debate and discussion on these topics. As of 2015, Glamour rolled out a special section on their website dedicated to the politics of the 2016 presidential election. They are not the only magazine that has begun to embrace articles of politics amongst guides of what not to wear and what not to eat.
Teen Vogue has probably made the most waves on the internet for their dedication to keeping their teenage readers abreast in current, controversial political topics with a remarkable “10 million monthly page views”. According to Elaine Welteroth, Teen Vogue’s editor-in-chief, “Teen Vogue was an aspirational fashion magazine”, but they realized that it needed to evolve into a magazine that spoke to issues its teenage audience was facing. I still remember getting the glossy monthly editions of Teen Vogue in the mail when I was fifteen, reading the articles on what the colors of fall were, what the teenage heartthrobs of Teen Wolf were up to, and even an article on cutting that still sticks with me today.
As a writer for Her Campus, especially one who writes primarily about politics, I often draw topics from the headlines of Teen Vogue articles, reading them, analyzing them and doing further research about possible other angles. In short, I can testify that these articles are valuable sources of information that keep readers up to date in an ever changing political landscape and most importantly allow their audience to draw their own conclusions.
Interestingly, there does not seem to be one true conclusion on women’s magazines. Do they harm women, or do they help them?
In the same breath that The Washington Post praises Glamour for discussing politics it also appears to mock it, stating that this was so-called big news. In this same article The Washington Post refers to women’s magazines as “vapid wastelands that traffic in the business of making women feel badly about themselves but just empowered enough to buy their advertisers’ product”. This sort of juxtaposition is common in critiques of women’s magazines. On August 17, 2015, Vox published the article ,“8 reasons women’s magazines are bad for your health”, and about a year later they published ,“Don’t underestimate Cosmo. Women’s magazines are taking on Trump.” This is not to say that the criticism is invalid or the praise unworthy. Vox is right when they discuss the dangers in the diets and detoxes lauded in women’s magazines and The Washington Post is also correct when they discuss that Glamour’s political coverage focused more on the fashion and lives on female politicians rather than their politics. The Atlantic is also correct in saying that women in women’s magazines are often eroticised and objectified, reducing talented, dedicated, and intelligent women to merely beautiful. However, this is not to say that this is the case for all women’s magazines. Vox is also correct in saying that an interview by Cosmo of Ivanka Trump, Marie Claire’s article on women and gun control and President Obama’s op-ed on feminism in Glamour are all important pieces of journalism and especially as part of the 2016 campaign and election news cycle. Perhaps, The Washington Post gets it right when they say women’s magazines have always been a “blend of the serious and non-serious, the personal and the political”. This is certainly a case to be made that articles about loving yourself just the way you are among pages of hundred dollar makeup ads, suggestions of ‘affordable’ five hundred dollar dresses, workout routines from Hollywood, and articles that knock important women down to earth by reducing them to a blow out with a bright pink lip, harm women’s image, self esteem, and perpetuate the notion that this is all women are.
We live in a society that expects women to be fit and beautiful and intelligent but mock women who are too muscular or too thin and insult women who like makeup and say that intelligent women threaten men. There is a double-edged sword against women, so, in my opinion, there ought to be nothing more empowering than slicking on lipstick in the color of the season and opening up Teen Vogue and being informed on immigration, healthy relationships and, yes, what’s in fashion.