A Magazine of Her Own? - Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, 1800-1914 (Hardcover)

Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?
A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. It is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading.