ABSTRACT

Women’s journals rule the world. Newspaper stands from Delhi to Changsha, from London to Vladiwostok sell them. These journals claim to disseminate particular and gendered knowledge, knowledge ‘appropriate’ to women, and they propagate ever new versions of ‘New Women’ who may (or may not) look quite different, depending on where the news-stand happens to be situated and depending on the year we write. While diversity is a striking element in the production, the dissemination and the consumption of these journals around the world, there is much that is shared by these media regardless of whether they appear in seventeenth-century England or in twenty-first century China – if only the perennial interest in fashion and beauty, motherhood and female spending behaviour or economic independence for women, to give but a few examples (Shevelow 1989; Ballaster et al. 1991; Johansson 1998; Evans 2008; Judge 2015). The arrival of franchise magazines and their ‘global conquest’ in the second half of the twentieth century has been said to have triggered the formation of a ‘common language’ (including images and different genres of text) in women’s magazines around the world, but this development goes back a long way, even further than what could be called a ‘Feminist Internationale’ in the early twentieth century, which marks the beginnings of sustained international and intercultural exchanges between ‘women circles’ and their reflection on the pages of the world’s women’s magazines which I will highlight in this chapter.