Ferguson and the ‘cult of femininity’

Marjorie Ferguson analysed women’s magazines and the extent to which they are concerned with the practices and beliefs of a ‘cult of femininity’. According to Ferguson, these magazines not only reflect the role of woman in society but they also offer guidance and socialisation into that role. Ferguson suggests that women’s magazines attempt to ‘promote collective female social ‘reality’, the world of women.’ Top-selling magazines such as Woman, Woman’s Own, Bella and Woman’s Weekly offer both guidance and membership into this ‘cult of femininity’.

“This is a world founded on conformity to a set of shared meanings where a consciously cultivated female bond acts as the social cement of female solidarity. …Through the selective perception and interpretation of the wider world from the viewpoint of the ‘woman’s angle’, the editors of these sacred oracle sustain a social ‘reality’ that is ‘forever feminine’.”

(Ferguson, Forever feminine: Women’s magazinesand the cult of femininity 1983)

“The success of the women’s magazine is no doubt connected with its ability to encompass glaring contradictions coherently in its pages.”

Peter Jackson “Making Sense of Men’s Magazines”, pg. 9

1. Magazines offer audiences membership into a gender-based club, making them feel part of a

group and offering them ‘sisterhood’/ ’brotherhood’. It is socialisation through gender.

2. Magazines continue to address gender in terms of binary

division: you are either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and

there is not plurality within gender

3.Magazines reassert and reinforce a specific archetype of what it is

to be male/ female, constructing a sense of ‘masculinity’ or

‘femininity’

4.The treatment of an entire gender as homogenous is a mode of

oppression. The denial of plurality within genders and the reinforcement of binary

opposition signals a taxonomy of division, the definition of gender

roles through exclusive categories, and the reinforcement

of hegemonic structures of gender relations.

5.Magazines increasingly offer audiences a choice of how to

express their own gender

6.Magazines reinforce stereotypes of gender in a way that maintains

patriarchal relations and the subordination of women

How can these theorists/ statements be applied to the magazines? How could you use them to discuss identity and representation?