How low can they go?

Women's magazines, once the source of first-rate writing, now offer a steady diet of diets and product tie-ins to readers who get no respect.

By Kera Bolonik

Dec. 10, 2001 | When Mademoiselle died a very public death in October, media eulogizers across the nation remembered the magazine with yearning and disdain: They celebrated its illustrious literary legacy, but recalled with bitterness the decade-long identity crisis that preceded the magazine's demise.

After 66 years of continuous publication, Mademoiselle had become little more than a product-pushing, "Sex and the City" fanzine, a far cry from the magazine that launched the careers of writers like Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon and Jennifer Egan -- and won O. Henry Awards (43) and a National Magazine Award for Fiction in the process.

Its disappearance from newsstands marked an official departure, but there are those -- editors and readers alike -- who believe that Mademoiselle died, along with a handful of other "women's glossies," when they stopped publishing fiction back in the 1990s. The move was seen by some media analysts to have been financially inevitable, but was interpreted by many in the worlds of media and publishing as a surrender to simplistic marketing instincts and a misinterpretation of readers' interests and aptitude.

Whatever the motivation, the disappearance of fiction from the pages of Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar and Redbook marked the end of an era in which these magazines, competing with "men's magazines" like Esquire and Playboy, published some of the country's best fiction writers -- in many cases before they had been published anywhere else. And the fall of Mademoiselle, despite its many attempts to revamp itself to please advertisers, has revived the debate about whether readers of so-called women's magazines would ever buy glossies that included fiction.

In their early years -- from the turn of the century until the mid-1960s -- women's magazines had a specific mission. Says Eileen Schnurr, a former Redbook editor and Mademoiselle's last fiction editor, "Women's magazines were meant to be women's companions. It was a different time, a pre-television era. They'd talk about all of the housekeeping problems and so on. Women were all at home in those days. It helped them with their problems and entertained them with stories."

This audience of housewives, despite a label that now registers as a term of disrespect, was believed to be interested in fine writing, and the magazines vied for their subscriptions -- the only way the magazines were sold for many years. Redbook began as an all-fiction magazine in 1903, and published five stories and one condensed novel in every issue until the 1970s. Harper's Bazaar, eventual winner of 51 O. Henry Awards, published the work of Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever and Gina Berriault. And before Helen Gurley Brown came to reinvent Cosmopolitan, the magazine was often compared to the Saturday Evening Post, collecting 12 O. Henry Awards for stories by Booth Tarkington, Anne Tyler, Joyce Carol Oates and Gail Godwin.

But as women left home to join the workforce, editors of women's magazines felt compelled to adapt to their readers' new lifestyles. In 1965, "Sex and the Single Girl" author Brown, an editorial novice, was brought in to revamp Cosmopolitan, which was believed to be losing relevance with the modern woman. Brown transformed the genteel and writerly publication by introducing readers to the "Cosmo girl," a sexy, sassy and savvy woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it -- at work and at (fore) play.

The transformation of Cosmopolitan into Cosmo forever changed the face of women's magazines. The self-conscious, sexually liberated voice resonated with readers -- and advertisers took note. Cosmo's circulation skyrocketed from 800,000 readers to more than 3 million. Publishers suddenly made circulation numbers an editorial concern. Recalls Ellen Stoianoff, a Family Circle senior editor and Mademoiselle's fiction editor from 1965 to 1976, "Before this, the editor in chief was the only one who had been included in sales and money issues. Suddenly the person who washed the windows was concerned with how well the magazine sold."

Editors were expected to go on ad sales calls as a "partner" of the publisher, says Suzanne Braun Levine, a former board member of The Association of Magazine Editors (ASME) and veteran editor of Mademoiselle, Ms. and Columbia Journalism Review. "Nobody ever said that the editors were supposed to produce editorial content that the publisher could sell, but they would be made aware of how helpful it was." As a result, says Levine, "editors' loyalty was distracted from readers, their focus was divided between the readers and the publishers."

Adds magazine veteran Katherine Brown Weissman, who now serves as a contributing editor at O magazine, "It was deemed necessary for survival to think very much in terms of image and markets, the way you would in making or selling any product. The problem with fiction was that it didn't help magazines compete; instead it used pages every month that could have been devoted to material that would appeal to a far broader sector of the market.

"Style rather than substance became hugely important in order to distinguish oneself among the many competing magazines," says Brown Weissman. "The 'voices' of these magazines were reinvented over and over, as was their look."

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