Desperately Seeking Women Readers U.S. Newspapers and the Construction of a Female Readership

Desperately Seeking Women Readers considers explicitly named women's pages in U.S. newspapers to understand how the newspaper industry has constructed women readers. Special pages for women developed in the 1890s but by the 1960s had disappeared. The book investigates the creation and collapse of these pages before considering contemporary case studies to articulate why newspapers during the 1990s recreated sex-specific pages. The author argues that women's sections reinforce women as consumers and men as citizens.