Our first speaker on the panel was Sharon Maxwell-Magnus who discussed her presentation, “The little woman is now big business”: Mary Grieve, the Woman who Made Woman
Magazine and Predicted the Fall of the Weeklies. Her work discusses one of the most influential yet unknown women’s magazine editors of the twentieth century in the UK. Mary Grieve was one of the first editors to introduce colour and her flair for understanding
her reader meant that by the late fifties, the magazine was selling over three and a
half million copies a week, making her a key influencer of her generation. Sharon’s paper rediscovers the work of Mary Grieve and how she contributed to the success of women’s weekly magazine publishing in the UK.
The next presentation was entitled “Housewives, Actresses, Victims and ‘Shameless’ Mistresses. The Representation of Women in the Czech Popular Magazines Before the WWI” presented by Jakub Machek. The research was conducted through analysing texts and illustrations of several Czech pictorial periodicals from 1890s family and fashion magazines, 1900s pictorial news and women’s magazines to 1910s sport, risqué and sensationalist metropolitan weeklies. Less conservative women’s magazines were addressing the subject of female emancipation whilst risqué and sensationalist weeklies typically included illustrations of women in the shape of cartoons of ‘shameless’ mistresses cheating on their husbands, plotting against wealthy men.
Finally, Rebecca Johinke presented “Judging a Book by its Cover: Sex and the City and the Representation of Lifestyle and Magazine Journalism”. Rebecca examines how Bradshaw’s writing moves from newspaper journalism in the early years of the series to magazine journalism and books in the final seasons and films and how Bradshaw, as a “celebrity writer”, increasingly becomes the subject of magazine journalism herself. It is argued that Bradshaw has significant success as a writer but that is underplayed in the series while her relationship failures are highlighted.
The next panel of the day is “Digital and Social Media.”
Rebecca Johinke 
Jakub Machek 
Sharon Magnus
