Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995. By Mary Ellen Zuckerman. (Westport: Greenwood, 1998. xx, 272 pp. $59.95, isbn 0-313-30675-3.)

Most people know that soap operas originated as radio and television advertisements for household cleaning products. Fewer realize that some of the most ubiquitous women's magazines in the grocery store check-out line—Family Circle and Woman's Day, for example—had a similarly curious inception as Depression-era grocers' bait. These magazines and others started as free leaflets designed to lure female shoppers into the local Piggly Wiggly or A&P. Such fascinating historical anecdotes pepper Mary Ellen Zuckerman's A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995, transforming commonplace women's magazines into potentially meaningful artifacts. This encyclopedic treatment sets out to address three main questions: How did women's magazines change? Why? And with what effect on their readers? The latter query remains unanswered; Zuckerman's primary sources—the magazines themselves, editors' collected documents, and oral interviews with editors—do not contain the reader voices or experiences necessary to answer this question. What the sources do provide is documentation of changes in content and editorial perspective. Thus, they permit Zuckerman to chart several shifting trajectories in the history of women's magazines. . . .

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