Notes

Women’s Realm: Industry Worksheet

Women’s Realm Information

· Originally Published weekly by IPC Magazines Limited from 1958 up until 2001 when it then merged into Women’s Weekly.

· 7-13 February 1965 Set Editions.

· Pricing of each issue of the magazine was 6d (Modern Day GBP is 6p)

· Post-World War Two and during the 1960s it was immensely popular among women with the number of copies reaching 12 million per week.

· Women’s Weekly was developed aside general weeklies which was another type of newspaper since the Victorian Era but Women’s Weekly succeeded.

History of Woman’s Realm

· Women’s Realm was launched as a mass-market women’s magazine on 22nd February 1958 to take the sales pressure off ‘Woman’ which was another magazine selling 3.17 million magazines a jump from 2.55 million.

· Women’s Realm’s Identity was based on the culture of the 1950s to 1970s culture as it the magazine was released in 1958. The position of Women were Housewives and had limited recognition outside in society, so Women’s Realm has established its brand on the Housewives ideals such as Cleaning, Gardening, Childcare, Cooking, Chorus, Make-up, and Fashion.

· Woman’s Realm was Merged in with Woman’s Weekly due to the reason that it cannot separate itself from its own old-fashioned image that they’ve attached themselves to. Also, the declining of sales in last few decades and had a sharp drop down in 2000 with a 15% decline each year. This could’ve have been the societal and cultural shifting changes that was occurring.

Research Task

Key Points:

· Amalgamated Press was founded in 1888 which is a predecessor to IPC media by Alfred Harmsworth and is when Woman’s Weekly was created and was published from in 1911.

· Woman’s Weekly is was the oldest Women’ magazine produced in the UK and sold on average 1.8 million copies in 1991.

· Woman’s realm was introduced in 1958 to provide more practical information and advice than the ones available in Woman’s Weekly.

· IPC decided to restyle Woman’s Realm magazine to attract a different segment of the audience of Women other than the mature reader of Woman’s Weekly.

Woman’s Realm 1960s edition

· There was a decline in women’s weekly magazine after a twenty-year dominance within the women’s magazine market with a 50% drop and reducing the amount of advertising done of the magazines.

· The Women’s magazines that were founded and published during early 1900s to meet the current values during those times such as society and culture which is drastically different in comparison to 1960s and 1970s.

· A cultural upheaval was occurring during 1960s to 1970s which involved Women have much more roles in society such as the improvement in equality and the roles that Women play in society with more opportunities.

Significance for the magazine

· In the time period in which Woman’s Realm was released was a much radically different when comparing to other periods within the 20th century. The significance of this is massive as its hard to keep adapting to the current environment which is constantly changing even within a decade as seen during the 1960s and 1970s.

· Woman’s Realm was originally targeted for a much different audience in which the culture and stereotypes were more simplified in how they were represented and how they can relate to each other. Women’s magazines were popular because they focused on specifically Women’s issues that were concurrent for the time and didn’t overlap into other issues that weren’t prevalent to them.

· Then when the society start to shift it was moving at pace which during the time was hard to keep up with and didn’t stabilise in the late 20th and early 21st century that was kickstarted again during the 2010s. Women’s Realm was a bit too focused in the past with holding its identity and having a struggle to change when the time comes for it.