What Women Want
In Chatelaine, Canadian women are getting the message they asked for. But it feels like something is missing from the mix
BY Lisa Rundle
Illustration by Kristi-Ly Green
Chatelaine. For generations of women across the country—and anyone stuck in a waiting room—it is the Canadian women’s magazine. Today’s glossy doesn’t just flop onto subscribers’ doorsteps each month—it sweeps into their homes to hang out like an old friend. It’s warm, cheery, consistent, never demanding, full of helpful hints: Guilt-free shopping! Instant fall beauty updates! 32 harvest recipes! 15-minute fitness! 12 storage solutions! Few problems are raised that aren’t followed by quick-and-easy solutions. And it always, always leaves you feeling good. Who doesn’t want a friend like that?
In Rona Maynard’s book, no one. “Chatelaine is a magazine totally dedicated to empowering women—to make the choices they want, to create the lives they want, to have fun, to seek pleasure, and not to feel guilty about it,” says Maynard, who recently stepped down after a decade as Chatelaine’s editor. To her, Chatelaine is about helping women in every aspect of their lives, particularly when they’re building career and family (and, not insignificantly, doing a lot of consuming).
When Maynard took over in 1994, the magazine was heading into a slump. Sure, it was selling, but the median age of its readers was going in the wrong direction—up. Younger women just weren’t turning on to the recipes-and-Canadian-celebrities mix, and the magazine was losing claim to the under-50 cohort coveted by advertisers. She began lightening and brightening copy and content, but it wasn’t enough. In 1999 came her overhaul. The redesign heavily pared back on more serious stories to focus on an all-out feel-good self-improvement vehicle. Features got squeezed out by the massive health section, beefed-up advice columns and more easily digestible how-tos. Today, Chatelaine’s weightier topical stories (about one per issue) are buried near the back and rarely sold on the cover.
And Chatelaine is more successful than ever. With three million readers per issue, plus a high-traffic website, the 76-year-old title isn’t just Canada’s top-selling women’s magazine—it’s Canada’s top-selling magazine, period.
Clearly Maynard has cooked up a recipe for success. But I can’t help feeling something’s missing from the mix. What happened to the Chatelaine of its best-known editor, Doris Anderson? From 1957 to 1977, her editorials were about women’s liberation and equal work for equal pay. One of Maynard’s most recent editorials hinges on the assumption that all women carry purses. The goal may be a complete empowerment package, but it’s made up of some pretty traditional components. Of course a commercial magazine can’t be expected to forge the feminist future, but couldn’t—shouldn’t—more serious journalism be part of the package? Elm Street did it. Fashion and food played alongside feminist content and serious journalism. Though Elm Street is no longer, it wasn’t because readers didn’t hunger for what was being served up—rather, a change in the way advertisers calculate readership made the book’s numbers drop overnight. “It was the really meaty stories that truly struck a chord,” says Gwen Smith, the magazine’s last editor. “Reader response to those stories was astounding.”
Chatelaine readers, it seems, aren’t into meaty. “I did a more ‘serious’ magazine when I started,” Maynard explains. “I had all these plans that were focused on articles, and that was where I really wanted to build up the magazine. But I learned that that was not where the passions of the readers lie. We have always done what our readers wanted.” Indeed, Chatelaine conducts possibly the most extensive market research of any magazine around—ongoing focus groups, regular studies and a panel of 16,000 readers who are contacted monthly for their views on the most recent issue. Chatelaine understands its demographic—a relatively privileged swath of Canadian women—so well that advertisers actually ask the magazine for market secrets. So they must have the right mix, right?
“You do eat, don’t you?” this from Kerry Mitchell, Chatelaine’s new publisher, who joined the magazine in August. I’d admitted that, despite not being a typical Chatelaine reader (I am female but so is my partner), I enjoyed much of what I read in the magazine and even found myself flagging some of those fantastic recipes. (My pear-and-fig crostini didn’t turn out that great, but I think I was having an allergic reaction to the perfume samples).
Yes, I, and many other lesbians, do eat. But last I heard, so do men. Why are “women” and “home responsibilities” still stuck together like burned cheese to a favourite pan? While I’d like men in general to take as much responsibility for home work as women do, it is hard to fault a magazine for helping women juggle responsibilities that, fair or not, are most often theirs.
My true lament is less about what’s there and more about what’s not. Today’s Chatelaine rarely questions the economic, social or political conditions in which women live. Instead, it offers tips on how to cope with those conditions. I’m glad women’s struggles are being acknowledged, but I yearn for discussions of more lasting solutions. Chatelaine may help some women achieve a certain balance—great family life and career, along with “me time” for their own home pedicure—but I want it to question why modern women are so exhausted and the unrealistic expectations of the double work day.
So why aren’t Chatelaine’s readers—intelligent, complicated and conscious—asking for it? We know from Chatelaine’s past that women can handle something meatier in the mix—so why isn’t that what today’s women want?
Despite the mega market research, that this exact package is “what women have asked for” may not be as self-evident as it seems. Maynard says she listened to reader feedback “with an inner ear”—meaning there was a certain amount of interpretation involved. After all, a magazine should surprise readers, not just reflect what they already know. Which means there could be room for change. As feminist Judy Rebick has noted, Anderson ran stories about pressing women’s issues that women didn’t know they were interested in until they read about them. Readers loved it.
Advertisers are another story. Feminism and a desire to speak to the lives of a broad group of women involves making people feel uncomfortable, says Penni Mitchell, editor of the magazine Herizons, and that’s not something a mainstream magazine can do much of. Chatelaine is “cheerful and upbeat,” she says, “not poor, screwed-over, angry or asking society to change.” That has as much to do with that other big ol’ revenue source as it does with readers. Advertisers may not wield direct control over the content of women’s mags, but they do have an undeniable impact. “Advertisers are looking at a zillion magazines in the women’s category,” says Smith, who is a Chatelaine fan. “It’s just easier to go for the non-threatening environment.” That heartier fare Elm Street’s readers loved scared some advertisers. It’s worth noting that, while Elm Street died, its sister fashion magazine, The Look, is going strong. “I like fashion magazines,” says Smith, “but are we honestly saying there are that many magazines addressing fashion and beauty because women want that much coverage, or because there’s enough advertising to sustain it? Is this what women are reading or what we’re giving women?”
Given the current proliferation of fashion and shopping rags, Chatelaine’s popularity is cause for celebration, really. It genuinely wants to improve women’s lives, not make them feel insecure about their hips and thighs. Which makes this more a story about codependence, as shaped by a consumer world. Chatelaine is both filling a need (“I need help juggling all my responsibilities and a salve for my unhappiness”) and partly responsible for perpetuating it through normalizing the troubles and reinforcing them as gender-female. In an ad-free world, a women’s magazine might just help make women’s lives not just healthier, prettier, tidier, easier, but also better in a longer lasting way.
This isn’t the end of the Chatelaine story. A new editor is at the helm: Kim Pittaway, writer of Chatelaine’s consistently feminist Broadside column (and a former This Magazine board member). She isn’t planning her own overhaul—just “tweaking.” Pittaway argues that the role of women’s magazines has changed since Anderson’s time. There’s a wider range of media covering women’s issues, and, while there’s an advocacy role for the magazine to play (around health issues in particular), it is no longer appropriate for Chatelaine to be staking out political positions or presuming to tell women what to think.
Readers, she says, have changed, too. “In one of our recent issues, we did a story on stain removal. Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have done that story because our readers would have been insulted by it. But now, our younger readers, especially, didn’t learn that from their moms so they want us to cover it,” says Pittaway. “And they don’t view it as a political issue; they view it as, ‘I got goop on my shirt. How do I get it out?’”
A women’s magazine is not a life manual (Pittaway says we’d all be flunking if it were). And it’s not a mirror. It sells a lot of fantasy along with its real-life stain-removal tips. While the Pittaway years will likely tip the balance toward providing political context and more consistent issues coverage, the basic mix is here to stay—unless women say they want otherwise. According to Pittaway, today’s Chatelaine readers are looking for a little bit of everything and see nothing contradictory about reading a story about women in Afghanistan and flipping to a glossy shoe layout. No doubt she’s right. Which is why, surely, readers will be able to handle a little more meat amid the recipes. I’d like to think so. I guess the proof will be in the pudding.
