By Traci Angel
From the Fall 2007 issue of HealthBeat
Intellectuals began accusing women’s magazines of perpetuating feminine stereotypes decades ago.
McCall‘s was the fastest growing of that genre in the 1960s when Betty Frieden wrote the manifesto “A Feminine Mystique,” which criticized the kinds of stories published in McCall‘s and similar publications that included traditional, gender-solidifying topics such as teenage girls at charm school, increasing baldness in women and wedding day suggestions. Forty years later, health is the hot topic for women’s general interest magazines, which regularly promote wellness and medical features.
These articles can provide valuable information overlooked by the mainstream press, according to researcher Barbara Barnett from the University of Kansas. But the coverage women receive from them often focus on superficial topics and reinforce women stereotypes as caregivers, she says.
Barnett, a former print journalist at The Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News and health care press officer for North Carolina Hospital Association and Family Health International, began following health coverage in women’s magazines eight years ago. She continues to track trends following a pilot study she orchestrated in 2001, which examined what kinds of health stories women’s magazines published.
For her study, Barnett conducted a qualitative analysis of how 44 stories were framed in 10 women’s magazines (Cosmopolitan, Curve, Essence, Girls’ Life, Jane, Ladies’ Home Journal, Latina, Marie-Claire, Ms. and Redbook) purchased at a single newsstand with issues dating from December 2000 to February 2001. Barnett’s article was published in the fall of 2006 in the journal Women and Language. A lengthy review process for academic journals, which includes “blind peer-review” by other scholars as well as author and editor revisions, can take several years from submission to publication.
Those articles often suggested all women are married, have children or are in a heterosexual relationship and tended to play into traditional female roles, Barnett says. She concluded that health stories in these publications motivated women to keep well so they could tend to their families.
Predictably, editors at women’s magazine’s defend their work.
“But women are caregivers,” says Julia Kagan, health director for Ladies’ Home Journal. This role is a reality rather than a stereotype, she says. Studies have found that women are the health gatekeepers in the family, she says, and women typically take an active role in keeping doctors’ appointments and maintaining a family’s medical records.
Ladies’ Home Journal claims a long history of health advocacy including helping “to spur the formation of the Food and Drug Administration, put an end to bogus medications and break the taboo of silence about sexually transmitted diseases,” according to a recent press release announcing the magazine’s “Second Annual Breakthrough Awards” given to medical professionals making significant contributions to health that benefits women and families. Kagan defends the use of the word “breakthrough” as “straight forward” language rather than sensationalistic. She says the magazine’s policy for health articles is to help women navigate today’s web of managed health care systems and misinformation.
Many women don’t see themselves as caregivers, but as “take-charge women who get the job (whatever it is) done,” says Yanick Rice Lamb, editorial director for Heart & Soul, a holistic health and fitness magazine for African-American women. “Magazines are niche publications designed to speak directly to the reader. Even if you frame parenting as a joint effort, for example, the language in the article could exclude women who are in relationships with other women. In this case, both women are ‘caregivers’ and the gender issue still exists.”
Barnett’s findings that cast women as caregivers, per societal norms, are valuable, says Amanda Hinnant, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism whose research focuses on production and consumption of health information in mainstream consumer magazines. She also studies editors’ and writers’ framing of health stories.
“I found that magazine journalists perceive readers’ desire for certainty and action so they avoid conveying the idea that health realities are out of one’s control,” says Hinnant. She has worked for Glamour and has contributed to Real Simple for six years.
Other health stories in women’s magazines might fall short on the bigger picture. Articles tend to avoid discussing health policy or socioeconomic disparities when presenting health information, Barnett says. Or, they might gloss over or omit crucial topics such as what women without health insurance face and the financial impacts of medical services, she says. One reason could be that health insurance stories are harder to tell in a magazine’s step-by-step service story formula, according to Barnett.
That’s an important critique, Hinnant says. “There is no doubt that women’s magazines today do carry on the feminist legacy of supporting a woman’s right to know about her body and make decisions about her care,” she says. But she points out that they rarely mention disparities and institutional health responsibility, perhaps because these topics fall outside a readers’ control and won’t resonate with them.
Tackling health stories that highlight financial considerations and cultural inequities could become more popular. Kagan reports that Ladies’ Home Journal‘s October 2007 issue features the monetary impact and options of treating breast cancer. Since black men are worse off than black women when it comes to health disparities, Heart & Soul editors are discussing the possibility of a dual audience publication for men and women to highlight these issues, says Lamb, who also teaches journalism at Howard University.
“Readers should expect stories with cutting-edge information, details about how and why things work and, when appropriate, more analysis and investigation. They should feel that articles are relevant to their lives,” Lamb says.
Both Kagan and Lamb say their magazines intend to keep expanding and including more investigative health features for women.
“We don’t see health as ‘women’s work.’ It’s everyone’s responsibility,” says Lamb. “However, the reality is that women go to the doctor more often than men and we talk about health more.”
Barnett’s study could be missing the point in fulfilling feminine roles, Kagan says. “We are writing to women and they are health caregivers, whether they are single moms or sharing a role with husbands or partners. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of.”
Traci Angel is finishing a master’s at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her graduate project includes writing an AHCJ slim guide on navigating the CDC’s online resources, and her research takes a broader look at how health journalists use the Web. She was a reporter for The Associated Press, managing editor of St. Louis Magazine and was most recently a Knight Editing Fellow at the University of Missouri.
