ABSTRACT
The previous chapter established that any attempt to ‘understand’ women’s magazines has to consider both the cultural and the economic conditions of their emergence. And in the case of the women’s ‘glossies’ that emerged in Britain during the 1980s, it is clear that their rise was underpinned by a confluence of cultural and economic forces. We have already seen the importance of the economics of flexibility, the ethos of enterprise and the discourses surrounding the growth of ‘post’-feminism. Building on this, much of the rest of this study will be concerned with exploring the business of women’s magazines and related institutions as discursive arenas of late twentieth-century femininity – a place where the cultural meanings and representations of modern femininity are forged, fought over and understood. At the same time, however, we also have to remember that women’s magazines are the products of an industry, with its own particular relations of production and consumption. Any attempt to understand the cultural discourses associated with women’s magazines, therefore, must do so with an eye to their economic context and business imperatives. As we shall see, the history of the magazine industry during the late twentieth century cannot be understood in isolation from its broader socio-economic context. In particular, this chapter focuses on how the 1980s and 1990s saw the British magazine business negotiate with both the rise of post-Fordist industrial flexibility and the growing hegemony of ideologies of free-market enterprise. In the case of the latter, we will see in coming chapters how – for the British magazine industry at least – the 1980s ‘enterprise ethos’ was not simply a chimera of abstract ideas, but was translated into very real economic and cultural practices that completely reconfigured women’s magazines as cultural forms.
