ABSTRACT
To ‘understand’ the texts that are the focus of this book – women’s magazines of the 1980s and 1990s – it is necessary to situate them within their broader cultural, political and socio-economic context. In particular, we need to think about the way in which shifts in women’s employment and cultural experience impacted upon the themes, imagery and modes of address that characterized the changing face of women’s magazines during the late twentieth century. As we shall see, within the magazine industry there developed a specific set of perceptions regarding the nature and trajectory of change in women’s lives during this period – perceptions which were a fundamental influence on the symbolic meanings and associations inscribed within the monthly ‘glossies’ which came to dominate the women’s magazine market.
