Feminism, UK Women’s Magazines and the Women Who Created Them, 1975-1992: More than Just a Glossy Cover.

This book is part of a multidisciplinary body of study which researches women’s magazines as a means of adding to our understanding of women’s history and media representations of that history. It analyses the envisioning of, and feminist ideologies disseminated through, women’s magazines in areas such as sexuality and reproductive rights, political representation, participation in the workplace, and freedom from intimate violence, from the nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties, which was a period both of great emancipation and upheaval for women. It examines how feminism was interpreted and reimagined in three influential magazines of the period: Cosmopolitan, for young, educated readers, Woman's Own, for older, domestically orientated and traditional readers and Spare Rib, a self-proclaimed feminist magazine at a time when feminism was not necessarily a term of praise. The book also offers a unique perspective on both women's and media history through in-depth interviews with editors of these magazines, exploring how they interacted with these ideas at a time when the magazines they led and curated were one of the very few spaces where women's perspectives were centre stage.