Women Readers Images in Zig-Zag magazine, 1920-1940

Abstract

This article analyzes a set of images of women readers that appeared in Zig-Zag magazine during the twenties and thirties, mainly in cover illustrations, advertisements, and photographs in articles. Through the analysis of visual and material elements in the images it explores the significance of modern life in relation to reading practices of women that the magazine displays. The article claims that there are images of reading scenes in which residual models of woman conceive reading with regard to new possibilities of efficiency in bourgeois home care, beauty and health. These models are in tension with a growing production of images in the magazine in which reading is associated with increasing degrees of independence resulting from woman participation in wage labor. At the same time, the paper studies the repetition of certain gestures on mass press serialized images and the possible significance this entails in the representations of female reading practices, in particular that of the recurring gestures in beauty-oriented advertisements in which women look at a mirror.