Language, women’s magazines and socialization of women

Throughout the years women’s magazines have proved to be a profitable market. In general, these magazines are known as moral guides, shopping guides, and texts of stories and advice columns that can serve as an inspiration for different kinds of women. The numbers of sales of most of these women’s magazines is impressive. Both women and young women have a history of consumption of these magazines that still continues today. For years, researchers have been investigating what it is that draws the women and teens to subscribe to these magazines. What kinds of techniques and strategies are being used? And what influence do these magazines have on the socialization of gender roles for women? Although these questions take much research and analyzing to even begin to answer, the use of language and different types of text is a great place to begin.

[...] Gossip, as Deborah Jones describes it in The Feminist Critique of Language, is the of talking between women in their roles as women, intimate in style, personal and domestic in topic and setting, a female cultural event which springs from and perpetuates the restrictions of female role, but also gives the comfort of validation” (Jones, 243). Gossip forms a kind of speech community. It is no wonder that magazine editors and publishers have capitalized on this aspect of women’s culture and communication. [...]

[...] In conclusion, women’s magazines have amassed billions of dollars in sales and are widely popular throughout the United States and many other countries as well. They use techniques to promote “community” among readers, and try to get the readers to feel as though they are in a conversation or a chat session with their girlfriends. The use of this discourse of a community of sisters and friends is clever and, obviously, successful. Editors and copywriters go to great pains to learn about their target audience. [...]

[...] Fashion domestic advice, mini biographies of the Royal Family, and interviews with celebrities were summed up in the category of Beetham suggests that the confidential tone of the magazine was made from the breaking up of the text into snippets or snatches, the colloquialisms and the creation of journalistic and editorial personae who addressed the reader as an intimate (202). The magazine was seen as a “place in which women shared with each other the secrets of their femininity (203). [...]