The Trend of Constructing Women as Consumers - Term Paper Example

Constructing Women as Consumers Name: University: Date: Constructing Women as Consumers Introduction Consumers’ production is an important feature of modern capitalism. Ever since the World War II, the relative weight of symbolic or immaterial aspects of the process of production has steadily increased and the mediation effort of fitting consumers as well as producers together has turned out to be very important to the market success. Basically, women’s magazines were particularly involved in working out the image of the working women by emphasising how they could utilise products to achieve amusing and efficient home life. Early women’s magazines, played a crucial role in shifting the female identities’ social valuation far from those that focus on the old-fashioned feminine quests, towards those focussed on intensified involvement of workforces, commodified private life as well as consumerism. Identity concept is valuable for conceptualisation of interrelations between tastes institutional as well as social factors and consumption. In view of this, advertisers are attracted to differences and similarities in how both women and men get and analyse information. Normally, men directly look at the key message of a particular advertisement while women evaluate the primary message and pick up numerous clues from the advert and weave the threads together so as to understand and conjecture the message’s inner meaning. The essay seeks to show the trend of constructing women as consumers. Discussion In early 20th century, Zuckerma (1995) posits that editors of women's magazine realised that education could become a crucial mission of their magazines. For this reason, the magazines included nonfiction, investigative, homemaking and informational. The above-mentioned articles concentrated on topics like, venereal disease, child labour infant as well as maternal care, sanitation, and more other topics. Women's magazines during the First World War focussed on educating women concerning their role in the war and published critical information on how they could conserve food. At this time, the articles that were preferred by advertisers were those that educated the women about products or those that emphasised on activities like home-making that involved purchasing decisions. The reader’s inclinations and the advertisers’ wishes remained constant factors in the mind of the editors who were planning informational articles in the women's magazine. Between 1920s and early 1930s, the women's magazines experienced a transformation in its content, as reflected in the conducted educational campaigns. The changes in content according to Zuckerma (1995) were partly because of financial pressures in the industry, general changes in the society and the changing role of women due to their increase in number in the workforce. Early in the 1920s, women's magazines focused on informational material about political and social issues, but this changed in the 1930s, with the fiction content taking the main role while the declined nonfiction content concentrating on the light topics like leisure activities and travel. Imperatively, beauty and consumer columns increased as evidenced by the Woman's Home Companion. The content published by the Companion in early 1920 involved tips for investing, career advice, world affairs, fashion photos, politics as well social issues. The magazine started focussing on advertisement in 1925, and it offered pro-advertising editorial almost every months for nearly eight years. Although the Companion argued that the advertisements were for educating consumers, Zuckerma (1995) posits that it its main agenda was to please the advertisers. Basically, the Companion with its information concerning political issues and voting had attracted millions of readers, but ultimately the fierce competition and market forces impacted the magazine industry; thus, influencing the Companion editorial decision-making process. Readers who understood the educational articles on political and social issues published by the magazine found it hard to understand the main goal of the pro-advertising editorials. All through the different stages of product development, such as design, labelling as well advertising, Arvidsson (2000) posits that the labour of product conceptualisation is still attached to considerations of the desired or actual nature of the end-users. By means of such practices, the development of a new ‘user identity’ together with the product happens and, in due course, engraved in its symbolic as well as material properties. For this reason, consumer goods are developed to provide to certain type of users or specific consumer personalities. In the 1960s, Arvidsson (2000) suggests that a ‘New Woman’ surfaced as new personality of the consumers, as a fresh means of utilising as well associating with the consumer goods. At first, the woman was frequently was targeted by the advertisements that focussed on body care products and cosmetics but later the focus changed to mundane goods such as pasta or Piaggio’s motor scooters, which were presented as objects with the intention of expressing and elaborating female subjectivity. According to Arvidsson (2000), the women’s magazines espoused the New Woman as the target figure by magazines such as Amica, Annabella as well as Grazia. The New Woman turned out to be a tangible and real human kind that resided in the Italian public culture. In Amica, Annabella and Grazia magazines, women in Italy were requested to utilise consumer goods as means of creatively elaborating their subjectivity and also to associate with themselves as subjects gifted with agency and rights. Arvidsson (2000) asserts that the ‘New Woman’ surfaced from the dissemination of the motivation research. Basically, the motivation research provided a means of organizing what appeared to be incoherent or irrational resistance expressions towards the new conception of how goods and consumers can relate. Therefore, the New Woman was considered a series of symbolic and material dispositions engraved into the consumer culture. The New Woman as mentioned by Arvidsson (2000) became the innovative way of becoming a woman by means of industrious power of marketing as well as advertising. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as defined by Fairclough (1989) is a form of social practice where ideology together with power influence and interact with each other. CDA can also be described as a form of analytical discourse research which talks about dominance, abuse of social power as well as inequality, and how they are bred, sanctioned and resisted. In view of this, as an ideology, beauty is produced as well as reproduced by means of advertisements. Advertisements of beauty products in Women’s magazines normally manipulate readers to a level that they believe everything written in the magazine. Without a doubt, advertisements are popular amongst the women because they read magazines every day, but early magazines were written in a way to attract women customers. Basically, the positioning of the advertisement actors offers particular message, which occasionally is associated with dominancy or power. Akin to the New Woman that emerged in 1960s, the ‘Girl’ had earlier emerged in the 1920s from the silver screen, glossy magazines’ pages as well as the stage. According to Sylvester (2007), she was considered an ornament in Europe, especially Germany and the United States. The Girl as a young woman who is financially independent and fashionable, she offered a mass consumption market. Sylvester (2007) maintains that the magazine offered a space where a new space was opened by the interplay of the Girl as the magazine consumer and the Girl as the magazine product in the Weimar mass culture. In view of this, the consumption process facilitated the Girl-consumer changed the artificial actuality of the society with no relations as the magazine displayed into her own realism. Fritz Giese, a German cultural critic associates the disciplined and uniform dance formation to Taylorism and Fordism ethics works that was brought in Germany from the U.S. Such philosophies related the human body with machines that normally collapse and streamline work processes so as to improve production. Furthermore, Fordism supports the worker involvement in the process of consumption as well as production; the objective is that the worker should eventually become the product’s consumer. Therefore, the magazine consumption changed the Girl-image consumer into the Girl-phenomenon producer. The Girl phenomenon happened mainly in the magazines and on stage depicting a young professional and independent female who is more and more oriented towards consumerism. This was evidenced in a number of women’s magazines such as The Journal (Das Blatt der Hausfrau) as well as The Lady (Die Dame). First published in 1886, The Journal addressed issues regarding the middle-class housewife and its topic ranged from the children and kitchen and to practical themes regarding day-to-day life in addition to wearable fashion. On the other hand, The Lady was a more stylish magazine and mainly targeted young single professional women as well as upper-class married women. While The Journal offered its readers an insight about the life of women in the Weimar Republic, The Lady focused on providing concrete ideas about the life of a ‘Girl’. As a consequence, the magazine readers became consumers and changed into producer of the commodities they were consuming on the magazine. Floch’s (1995) semiotic square can be utilised to structure and organize meanings of advertisement in the western culture. By trying to adapt semiotic tools so as to suit the advertising requirements, one can discern how an advertisement is rooted in different types of values, and how women’s magazine editors exploit the discursive strategies in order to outshine the competitors. This seems to be because of the brand discourse overall pervasiveness and particularly due to advertising communication. In the early women’s magazine, what appeared to conquer is the logic of only creating a ‘presence’ in the crowded communications field instead of clearly positioning the magazine’s discourse, which certainly could have involved sacrificing something and depending on the overall consistency and value of what the magazine could offer. Starr (2004) asserts that participation of women in the labour market increased dramatically in the 1960s, and this resulted in increased real wages. The changing attitudes emerged through the increased demand for on overcoming the apparent discontents of traditional feminine identity as well as the growing supply of strategies and idea for enhancing self-realization by means of paid work. Magazines such as the Working Mother emphasized the likelihoods of utilising products so as to realize desires and shape identity, particularly for physical appearance that is good-looking and effective as well as compassionate, effective, enjoyable home life. Intrinsically, such magazines generated a shift in social evaluation of female identities far from those that focused on the conventional feminine pursuits. Given that perceptions are shaped by mass media, mass media can as well shape behavior and preferences. The Working Mother as well as Working Woman magazines both contributed to the preferences changes related to the increasing participation of women in the labor force. Starr (2004) posits that preferences changes associated with identity, while having independent components possess some clear endogeneities in regard to consumption. In order to make a woman identity identifiable, a woman who was working was believed to require special configurations of accessories, makeup and clothing as well as products for body, skin, and hair. In order to leverage her time, the working woman according to Starr (2004) required special products that could generate high home life quality while simultaneously reducing hassles and saving time. Such ideas developed from commercially-positioned discourses concerning the identity of the working woman, which certainly diversified demands to people’s needs for ideas concerning identity with messages meant for selling products. Therefore, product messages figured in the women’s magazines prominently with the goal of relating identity to consumption and preferences, but not for dictating consumers what to feel or think. Instead, it is because companies intend consumers to feel and think towards what is reverberating to them. This point out that imagery and messages in the women’s magazine were used to influence consumption of products by the working women. Elle an international fashion magazine has existed for decades and has since 1940s projected a reader image who was a citizen, a mother as well as working woman with diversified expertise. According to Weiner (1999), the skill, simplicity, humor as well as good sense that Elle exhibited could only be equated to her talents in her remunerated work. French did not just stay at home during the postwar years; instead they started working and going to schools. Weiner (1999) opines that the gradual social changes were dwarfed by the domesticity valorisation in the postwar France. The valorisation of female domesticity happened because of technology advancement. Between 1950 and 1958, the home appliances started increasing and production increased by almost 400%. For women able to buy home appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines, they were able to change the laborious work of household tasks, even though the number of hours used on such tasks remained almost the same. The adverts in the magazine as evidenced in Cucina Italiana (1958) provided misleading information to the readers: for instance, the readers were told that the dishwasher did the job of the housewife (see appendix one). Other magazines such as Grazia (1962) provided honest information that was helpful to the readers (see Appendix two). Simultaneously with the industrial boom, the editors of women’s magazines such as Elle changed the homes to become an imaginary space that could be experienced by all women regardless of their social class. Elle advertisements demonstrated how refrigerators as well as washing machines were ideal gifts for women. The housewives were made a stylish and glamorous figure by the women’s magazines, which also made them believe that their appliances efficiency was an indication of pleasure and progress. According to Weiner (1999), the pictures of ultra-modern home space in the magazines were typically not real. In 1940s, Elle, which sources its cues from the American experience continually, maintained that women should fight the shortages as well as poor conditions so as to make their homes comfortable and bring happiness to their lives. In features as well as fashions, Elle displayed women as efficient and inventive housewife. However, the magazine attempt to appeal to both its faithful adult readers as well as teenage girls failed miserably. Failure to dominate the female adolescent, made the magazine to focus on the relational and domestic orientation. For this reason, Mademoiselle regarded itself as a French girls’ best friend and offered content that could help them make good decisions on, beauty products, fashions, hairstyles, accessories, and so on. Besides that, Mademoiselle interchangeably acted as a platform for advertisement and as a guide to consumer products forum for them. The physical attractiveness has for decades been promoted through magazine articles which have changed the routine construction of the ideal product. In spite of subversion ripples, magazines such as Elle and The Lady remains rigidly traditional; offering a space through which restrictive discourses of sexuality and gender are strongly maintained. Through such deconstructive strategies, the early women’s magazines pedagogic regimes of truth could be disrupted and offer open and more transgressive way of doing gender advertisements. Conclusion In conclusion, the essay has shown the trend of constructing women as consumers by focusing on a number of earlier women’s magazines such as Elle, the Companion, The Lady and Mademoiselle. As mentioned in the essay, early magazines progressively introduced advertisements with main focus being women, but most content were exaggerated. Until now, magazines are depending on advertising and companies have since 1920s been placing features in magazines with the goal of selling products under the facade of editorial content. Magazines are exploiting the sense that women are governed by ‘materialistic impulses, and therefore, most content in the women’s magazines are embedded in this assertion. Women’s magazines serve as a signifier; therefore, editors expect the readers to see the relationship between text (magazine) and sign (advert) as being equally dependent, given that an advert can be judged by the reader in terms of its context. References Arvidsson, A. (2000). The Therapy of Consumption Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958-62. Journal of Material Culture, 5(3), 251–274. Starr, M. A. (2004). Consumption, Identity, and the Sociocultural Constitution of ‘‘Preferences’’: Reading Women’s Magazines. Review of Social Economy, LXII(3), 291-305. Sylvester, N. (2007). The Girl in German women’s magazines in the 1920s. Journalism Studies, 8(4), 550-554. Weiner, S. (1999). Two Modernities: From "Elle" to "Mademoiselle". Women's Magazines in Postwar France. Contemporary European History, 8(3), 395-409. Zuckerma, M. E. (1995). From Educated Citizen to Educated Consumer: The Good Citizenship and Pro-Advertising Campaigns in the Woman's Home Companion, 1920-1938. American Periodicals, 5, 86-110. Appendices Appendix One: Misleading information about the dishwasher Appendix 2: Honest information about Gradina product Read More