What do women want?

Abstract

The changing depictions of working or ‘New’ women in the women’s magazine industry of the 1980s and 1990s can be understood more clearly when we consider them in relation not only to feminist accounts of commercial culture, but also to a closer analysis of commercial practices. Far from ‘foisting’ magazines (whether they be print or online) on an unsuspecting ‘market gap’ of women, this paper shows that where ‘gaps’ in the market are identified, the translation of this into a product that women will want to read is much more difficult. Instead, it is argued that the economic practices of magazine publishing can only be understood when we also think about them in terms of the cultural conditions in which they exist.