ABSTRACT
Magazine publishing does not exist in isolation from other commercial institutions of cultural production. Allied especially closely is the advertising industry. Advertising has been central to the business of women’s magazines since the 1890s, when the ‘ladies’ papers’ realized the potential profits to be gained through the subsidy of cover prices by advertising revenues (Ballaster et al., 1991: 115). Prior to World War Two, however, British advertisers saw women’s magazines as relatively unimportant to the business of marketing compared to, say, newspapers and general interest publications. By the 1950s this had changed. The expansion of mass consumer markets, especially those oriented around women’s expenditure, brought a significant increase in women’s magazines’ share of total advertising expenditure (Elliott, 1962: 209).1 Janice Winship (1987: 38) has observed that this close relationship between the magazine business and advertisers has always placed magazine producers in a double bind. Women’s magazines have to appeal to their readers in order to maintain a high circulation, yet since no magazine can make a profit on its cover price alone it is ‘the wooing of advertisers which is . . . pivotal in the competitive search for revenue’ (Winship, 1987: 38).
