ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the editors’ notes to the first issues of two popular Indian magazines for women-Femina and Woman’s Era respectively. It adopts a critical approach to discourse analysis, which implies that it brings a prior socio-cultural-contextual theory about the data: the analysis seeks evidences from the socio-political and economic context of the text. The chapter assumes that conflicting power relations together with capitalist interests continue to strengthen the gendered ideals of women as homemakers, mothers and wives and beauty-idols. Lexicalization in the text gives away many hints as to how an ideology or social identity is constituted and practiced. The phrases such as status of women, inferior status, been discriminated, to try for equality, women’s emancipation, women’s liberation prove that the writer accepts that problems with women’s social and legal position and rights exist.
