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Article Excerpt
Abstract: Women's magazines have been a valuable source of health information for their readers, highlighting issues that were ignored by the mainstream press. Yet, in addition to teaching women about health, magazines also teach women about femininity--about appropriate roles and values. This manuscript reports findings from a qualitative analysis of more than 40 articles in 10 women's magazines. Magazines depicted women as caretakers of their own health, as well as the health of their loved ones. Articles framed health as women's work, suggesting that women must be vigilant to protect their families' health. Although they provided valuable information on a variety of health concerns, women's magazines reinforced and idealized traditional feminine stereotypes of women as caretakers. Rather than present caretaking as an expected role, magazines might consider why women are responsible for this work and explore how women view their caretaking tasks.
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For more than a century, women's magazines in the United States have provided readers with a wealth of information aimed at helping them develop essential feminine skills and knowledge. Magazines have published articles advising women how to bake the perfect meatloaf, how to maintain the perfect hairstyle, and how to experience the perfect orgasm. Magazines have offered advice about how to save money on back-to-school clothes, how to save time in the kitchen, and how to save a failing marriage. To help women cope with life's imperfections, magazines have provided instructions on how to select fashions that hide figure "flaws," how to cope with male rejection, how to circumvent cranky coworkers or inept bosses, and how to help a child who is failing in school. For about the cost of a fast-food lunch, a single issue of a women's magazine provides at least a dozen articles offering advice to readers on how to make their lives easier, homes safer, and families happier. Women's magazines serve the role of a modern "high priestess" offering step-by-step instructions for "the demanding--but rewarding--state of womanhood" (Ferguson, 1983, p. 131, 185).
Women's magazines have become a how-to guide for daily living, and among the topics included in these instruction manuals is health. Contemporary women's magazines publish informational articles covering a broad spectrum of health topics, and magazines invite readers to learn more about their bodies so they can prevent illness and forestall disease. While these publications have been praised as an important source of health information for women (Consalvo, 1997; Harrison, 1982), magazines also have been criticized for their superficial treatment of health topics (Andsager & Powers, 1999; Gerlach, Marino, Weed, & Hoffman-Goetz, 1997) and their failure to challenge patriarchal and capitalistic ideologies, which dictate that happiness can be achieved through relationships with men and acquisition of products advertised in magazines (Demarest & Garner, 1992; Durham, 1996; Friedan, 1963; Leman, 1980; McCracken, 1993; Merskin, 1999; Steiner, 1995; Weston & Ruggiero, 1985-86; Wolf, 1991).
The purpose of this paper is to analyze health care coverage in a small sample of contemporary women's magazines. This project explores the content of health articles and uses feminist theory and qualitative textual analysis to discover the frames embedded within these health texts. Specifically, the papers seeks to determine:
RQ1: What health issues and topics are covered in women's magazines?
RQ2: How do women's magazines frame health care issues?
RQ3: What do these frames tell us about women's roles in the larger society?
Literature Review
In beginning a discussion of health coverage in women's magazines, it is important to consider the effects of two social phenomenon in the United States: the positioning of health as a consumer product and the second wave of the women's movement. Both are concerned with locus of responsibility for health. The health consumer movement positions good health as an undertaking--a task a person must accomplish--while the women's movement has encouraged women to learn more about health as a means of taking control of their bodies and their lives.
Ancient cultures labeled illness as punishment for immoral behavior, the work of demons, or an inexplicable act of nature; however, discoveries by 19th and 20th century scientists on how diseases spread changed beliefs about the causes of illness and generated discussions on the responsibilities for prevention (Keller, 1995; Kirkwood & Brown, 1995). In this modern context, illness was no longer viewed as external, the result of fate or curses or uncontrollable natural forces. Instead, disease was characterized as internal, caused by personal choices and actions, and this paradigm shift placed the onus of responsibility for illness on the individual (Kirkwood & Brown, 1995). As modern medicine developed cures for disease, individuals did indeed gain more control over their own health, and chronic diseases replaced infectious diseases as the most common causes of death in industrialized countries (Mensah, 2004). With these advances, the focus in public health shifted from disease containment to disease prevention, and individuals were encouraged to be architects of their own good health, rather than passive victims of illness (Kar, Alcalay & Alex, 2001).
The traditional rationale for health education was that disease and illness are largely preventable, that human behaviour is strongly linked to the aetiology of many diseases and conditions and the management of others, that therefore, people should be encouraged to adopt a healthy "lifestyle"... (Lupton, 1995, p. 44)
This change in health discourse meant "the reconfiguration of the individual, or subject, from a relatively 'docile,' passive recipient of advice and health care to one who possesses the capacity for self-control, responsibility, rationality, and enterprise" (Nettleton, 1997, p. 213). Medical problems and solutions were now formulated at the personal level, and health became a mega-value, encompassing all that was good and worthwhile (Crawford, 1980). In this perspective, good health became a much-sought-after utopia (Chrysanthou, 2002), and this focus on personal responsibility also fostered a culture of self-blame for personal failures. "Bad attitudes, habits, or actions are credited with causing diseases, and to the degree we are responsible for our bad 'life-styles' we are responsible for our diseases" (Kopelman, 1988, p. 52). In this construct, "poor health is a 'distasteful' state," and good health a "harmonious integration of body and mind" (Lupton, 1995, p. 70). While disease historically had been characterized as an outward symptom of inner corruption (Gilman, 1988; Sontag, 1990), the health consumer movement established wellness as evidence of restraint and good judgment.
Since the mid-1970s in the United States, the boundaries of what is popularly considered essential health behavior, or minimally responsible health behavior, have been expanding. The new health consciousness has ushered in an era of rising expectations fixed on improving and protecting the body. Whether in the name of health, fitness, or weight loss--themes that become entangled--some disciplined activity is usually mandated.... Discussion about health as a matter requiring self-control, discipline, denial, and will power is most clearly associated with a concept of health as a distinct goal. (Crawford, 1984, p. 66)
While consumer culture debates focused on issues of individual mastery, the relationship between health and power is a topic women's advocates and feminist scholars also have explored. Foucault (1986) posited that the private body is a site of public control, noting that medicine has garnered dominance and influence equal to that of religion. Crawford (1984) later characterized the body as a cultural text--"a powerful medium through which we interpret and give expression to our individual and social experience" (p. 61). Taking into consideration the relationship between the body and power, Lupton (1997) argued that the practice of medicine in the industrialized world is one way in which the ideology of patriarchy has been reinforced, a means of perpetuating the imbalance of power between women and men:
Feminist critics have viewed the medical profession as a largely patriarchal institution that used definitions of illness and disease to maintain the relative inequality of women by drawing attention to their weaknesses and susceptibility to illness and by taking control over areas of women's lives such as pregnancy and childbirth that were previously the domain of female lay practitioners and midwives. (p. 97)
As the second wave of feminism began in the United States in the 1960s, health became a topic of intense concern for women's advocates, many of whom argued that if women were to control their bodies, they needed factual information about biology and physiology.
Feminist activism in health starts from women's exclusion from medical knowledge and practice. Activists have pointed to ways in which such exclusion disempowers women, and have therefore sought to promote women's knowledge of how their bodies work as an act of empowerment. (Birke, 2003, pp. 42, 44)
In this context, women strove to become subjects, not objects, in their own health care discourse.
Mass media can play a role in shaping health knowledge by educating the public about health issues and increasing health professionals' accountability to the public (Rowan, 2000). Feminist scholars long have argued that women's magazines have played a significant role in shaping women's health debates, and, some scholars have suggested, in improving women's health. Many health concerns first came to the public's attention through women's magazines as these publications tried to make health-care information accessible and understandable (Harrsion, 1983). In the early 20th century, Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping ran negative articles on patent medicines, which had no proven efficacy and were high in alcohol content (Stage, 1979). The Women's Home Companion and the Delineator advocated the Pure Food and Drug Laws, and, in 1908, risking a violation of the Comstock Laws prohibiting the mailing of obscene materials, the Ladies' Home Journal ran articles on venereal disease (Zuckerman, 1998). The Journal also commissioned a series on the causes of maternal death and "convinced readers of the need for medical accountability" (Walker, 1998, p. 15). Good Housekeeping published articles on women's need for sex education, and the Pictorial Review advocated birth control (Zuckerman, 1998). In the 1930s, most women's magazines had an institute or center for testing consumer products, established, in...
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