Women's Magazines and Women Readers

Abstract

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.