“The Melancholy of Women’s Pages”: Readers, Features, and the Rise of Ad-Sponsored Media

Abstract Around the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. newspapers began to address women specifically in separate sections, hoping to gather a female audience for advertisers. Scholarship on early twentieth-century women consumers tends to emphasize possibility and self-expression. Women’s reactions to the first women’s pages, by contrast, indicate that they could feel constrained and condescended to when welcomed into the public sphere on the basis of being consumers. Readers and journalists aired their grievances about the women’s page in its first decades, and sometimes found ways to use the page to their own ends. But publishers carried on designing women’s features with advertisers in mind. By the 1920s, the women’s page had become visually seductive, didactic, domestic, and relentlessly consumerist. This article uses the women’s page to investigate the rise of ad-subsidized media in the twentieth century and to weigh up the opportunities and costs of this media system.