THE PRESS
Woman's place
BILL GRUNDY
I try very hard to avoid them at all costs. I close my eyes so as not to see them. If any lie in my way I pass by, like the Levite, on the other side. But occasionally, at the dentist, in the doctor's waiting room, on a railway station where I have time to waste and nothing to read, one will some- times find its way into my hands. At which point curiosity conquers this cat. Swallow- ing my distaste, I open the thing. Holding it so that the flare from the glossy paper isn't too disturbing, I improve the literally shining hour by trying to find the editorial matter amid the mass of advertising. If I succeed, I read it in a furtive sort of way.
the,thirtg dowit•and wonder
who the hell writes it and who the hell they think reads it. I am talking, of course, of women's magazines.
From this you will gather that I am not the most fervid fan of Woman, Woman's Own, Woman's Realm, you name them I don't like them. I also used to assume that no other men liked them either, least of all the poor unfortunates who work on them. But I have just found out that, not for the first time in my life, I am utterly wrong.
Do you know that roughly one in five of the readers of those three magazines listed above are men? Even with a thing like Petti- coat, one in ten is a feller. Where do they read them? In bed? In the bath?
I get all this fascinating information from a book published this week by Michael Joseph. It's by Cynthia White. and it's called Women's Magazines, 1693-1968. Just get a load of that title. Did you realise the damned things have been around for nearly three hundred years? And they don't seem to have changed much. The first one, The Ladies Mercury, announced it would deal with `all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage behaviour, dress and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives or widows'. And so it did, says Miss White, 'with a forthrightness typical of an age which was bawdy, lusty and uninhibited'. Plus ca change . . . especi- ally as one sample letter Miss White quotes is from a man.
Her book was her doctorate thesis at London, as the PhD on the title page proudly implies, but you wouldn't know it from the style, which is full of facts and yet highly readable. It comes, of course, at a rather interesting time in the fortunes of women's mags. Things have not been quite as happy as they might in that field in the last decade or so. At its heyday in the late 'fifties, for example, Woman was selling about 31 million copies a week. The figures have fluctuated widely since, but now they seem to be trending fairly firmly towards about 2 million. Woman's Own and Woman's Realm have both had the same sort of proportionate drop. It's interesting, too, to note that taking the field as a whole no fewer than ten women's weeklies have disappeared altogether since the bonanza year of 1957.
The same applies to the monthly maga- zines. The casualty rate isn't as high, but in the majority of cases circulations are now seriously lower than they were twelve or thirteen years ago. What's the reason? Even a study of those that haven't suffered a big circulation drop doesn't help. True Romances has about held its own; a fairly similar rival, True, has put on about 50 per cent over the same period. And if that sug- gests that it's the 'trashier' stuff that is flourishing, think again. Family Circle, founded in 1964, has gone from 733,000 to over a million; a much smaller circulation mag, Mother, has also put on a lot in the last decade. Whereas, just to confuse further, Housewife, which sounds sort of similar to Mother, went into a rapid decline in the late 'fifties and 'sixties, ending this life in 1967 with about half the circulation it had ten years earlier.
So what's it all about? What's the secret of success, or the reason for the decline, which in many cases is still continuing alarmingly? Miss White puts forward several reasons, some of which contradict each other, nothing wrong with that, since life is seldom as logical as some people would wish. First, the analysts may have got it wrong. Dr Dichter,%oalledt in by tpc
in 1964 to study Woman's Own, deduced that magazines were failing to attract the new young woman, who was more experi- enced, affluent, and culturally aware than her predecessors. He prescribed an all-round upgrading of the intellectual level, although with certain caveats. The caveats were largely ignored. Perhaps as a result, the prescription has not worked.
Second, magazines are increasingly dom- inated by advertising revenue, which means that, increasingly, editorial content with a 'selling potential' is preferred. But in going for this sort of material, editors may be ignoring readers' known interests and pre- ferences. Here is another possible reason for falling circulation.
There are doubtless as many other pos- sible reasons for falling circulations as there are people thinking about the prob- lem. And it may be that they're all right. For, as Miss White says, the industry's diffi- culties do not stem from a single area, but from 'a complex, interacting set of factors, economic, social and cultural, which cannot be dealt with in isolation'.
In the meantime there is much baffle- ment. 'What do women want from their magazines?' one editor asks, and answers 'I don't know!' Until somebody does know, until the secret is discovered by science or by instinct, the decline in circulation is likely to continue. Women's magazines are clearly at a very interesting stage of their long and varied life. Miss White's book is the best guide yet to that life, to what is hap- pening to it now, and to what might happen next,
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