"It’s hard to imagine a social revolution being launched from their pages..."

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/23_2_womens-magazines.html

LAURA VANDERKAM Journey Through the Checkout Racks Comparing women’s magazines, then and now, shows how much America has changed.

The articles in today’s women’s magazines seem to be written explicitly for this “me time”—that is, centered on the reader herself and not on the larger world. After reading through the 1963 magazines, one can’t help finding the modern ones a bit shallow. It’s hard to imagine a social revolution being launched from their pages, as Friedan’s partly was. Only a few features deal with something beyond the reader’s own life—a tale in LHJ, for instance, of how the mother of a soldier killed in action met the nurse who treated him. Gone (mostly) are the short stories and the novels. In the 1963 Redbook, the anthropologist Margaret Mead answered outward-facing questions from readers (“Do very primitive societies have humor?” “Do you believe that our laws on drug addiction should be revised?”). In the 2013 Redbook, a similar role is filled by Soleil Moon Frye, the actress best known for playing Punky Brewster, who answers readers’ personal questions—one about a husband’s body odor, another about a fiancé’s pre-wedding jitters. Remember the January 1963 Redbook that told the anguished tale of Sherri Finkbine’s thalidomide exposure? The February 2013 issue looks at sexual health from a different perspective. One of its longest stories, hawked on the cover as BIRTH CONTROL THAT BOOSTS METABOLISM? SIGN US UP!, features women discussing why they switched contraceptive methods, with such headlines as SHE LOST THE EXTRA WEIGHTand HER LIBIDO IS BACK IN BUSINESS! Redbook writer Erin Zammett Ruddy reports that “as with so many things (sex life, hair, marriage), you don’t have to settle for so-so birth control.”