Two Modernities: from Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France

Abstract

Beginning with its first issue of 1945, Elle magazine was instrumental in changing the way the French saw female domesticity in the postwar period, infusing the domestic space with an aura of glamour and modernity. Newly glamorous female domesticity went hand-in-hand with images of women as voters and professionals, communicating to the magazine's readers that they could ‘have it all’ – but never to the exclusion of their primary identity as mothers and wives. This ultimately conservative postwar version of femininity came to be challenged in the early 1960s by Mademoiselle, a magazine that projected a reader unmarked by war memories and whose relationship to technology and modernity went beyond the home. Yet, Mademoiselle was grooming the fun-loving teenage girl as a consumer who would one day be a wife and mother as well; from one version of modernity to another, feminine destiny remained the same.

Hafting with beeswax in the Final Palaeolithic: a barbed point from Bergkamen

“…For all those periods, barbed points exhibiting hafting residues are also known. Such adhesive remains are usually identified as birch tar, sometimes supplemented by a binding made of bast or sinew (Weiner 1999; Gramsch 2000, 2002).…”

“…The use of birch tar, or a comparable substance produced by the dry distillation of birch bark, as an adhesive, is, however, evidenced in Europe as early as the late Middle Pleistocene, although the processes for its production remain unknown (Koller et al 2001; Mazza et al 2006). Further reports of birch tar come from the Upper and Final Palaeolithic, when it was mainly used to mount lithic projectile points (Bokelmann 1999; Weiner 1999; Baales 2002, 2006; Dinnis et al 2009).…”

Fashion meets journalism: Mapping and evaluating Australian fashion media

“…However, according to the market and active readers, the reality is that the style notes of Australian fashion writers and journalists are on par with world-class standards. Standard accounts of Australian journalism (Bonney andWilson 1983, Conboy 2007) offer little insight into the fashion world, although studies in Australia and worldwide have provided an insight into the culture of magazines and women"s publications (Winship 1987, Hermes 1995, Weiner 1999, Craik 2000, Hartley and Rennie 2004, Lumby 1999). However, a platform for change is still lacking within the industry nationally as a whole.…”

‘Pigeon-eyed readers’: The adaptation and formation of a global Asian fashion magazine

“…As such, the literature can be divided into four general categories, although there is some overlap here. The first category centres on magazines and the development of the feminine public sphere and emancipation for women; here, fashion and women's magazines are integral in establishing a 'world of women' such that it allows the female readership to identify or produce a sense of its own resistance, subversion or dominance (Winship 1987;Ballaster 1991;Weiner 1999). The second category of writing investigates how magazines promote certain forms of knowledge formation, and ways of reading in particular, with niche readers such as teenage girls, middle-aged women, and so on (Hermes 1995;Skov 1995;McRobbie 1997).…”

“…The last category draws on the relationship that magazines have with the nation and the interface between the urbanscape and modernization; examples include discussions of post-war France (Weiner 1999), Japan (Sakamoto 1999) and Hong Kong (Fung 2002). Much of this literature explores how fashion magazines have performed the role of cultural intermediary and at times actively influenced the politics of a nation that is in transition.…”