This entry provides an introduction to the main works on women's reading practices, and women as readers/consumers of women's magazines. Much of existing research in this field is based on the Victorian fallacy that women are passive consumers of media texts. In contrast, this entry focuses on the small section of existing work that understand women readers as active participants in meaning‐making, specifically concentrating on the pleasures, otherwise termed “uses and gratifications” that women gain through the act of reading magazines. The entry begins with Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, and then discusses Holland and Sherman's, and Flynn and Schweickart's work on women readers. It then explains that some women readers identify with the messages found in women's magazines, and some do not; yet, they all continue to read women's magazines. Gender‐focused research reveals that women readers obtain a plethora of pleasures though the act of reading/consuming women's magazines and this is one of the reasons that they repeatedly revisit this particular media genre. Other media and communication studies research also confirms that there are a number of motives, urging audiences to repeatedly consume specific media. However, it would be interesting to see an expansion on reader‐response studies of women reading women's magazines, especially through a closer consideration of context, race, class, and sexual orientation.
Historians have written extensively on early twentieth-century British women's suffrage, and late nineteenth-century feminisms. Nevertheless, there is still an insufficiency in studies that pay attention to the textual and visual contents of feminist periodicals published during the 1880s and 1890s. Non-mainstream periodicals produced by women for women allow us to explore distinctive hybrid modes of gender. They also offer us exclusive access into the everyday experiences, and individual thoughts of actual late nineteenth century women. In order to expand our collective archaeological project of reinterpreting the past from women's point of view, this article focuses on women's interviews and portraits published in the Women's Penny Paper/Women's Herald (Oct. 27, 1888 -Apr. 23, 1892, demonstrating that they often combined traditional with more radical emergent signifiers of womanhood in written and pictorial form. This is a journey into the verbal and non-verbal messages communicated through women's words and bodies, expanding to our understanding of late nineteenth century New Women and the manner in which they utilized their choice of words and appearance to gain power.
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