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IT HAS BECOME ALMOST COMMONPLACE LATELY FOR FEMINIST SCHOLARS of mass media and popular culture to confess their love, often clandestine, for the objects they study: MTV, soap operas, gory thrillers, self-help manuals. Unlike these writers, Ellen McCracken is no fan of women's magazines. In her detailed study, McCracken examines nearly fifty US women's periodicals published in the early 1980s. Using a process she calls" negative hermeneutics," McCracken identifies a master narrative at work in every one of these magazines, from Mademoiselle to Ms., as her subtitle indicates. She describes a textual world that trivializes women's intellect, breaks sexual and racial taboos only to contain them, objectifies female bodies, and teaches women to see themselves through the eyes of a male observer.

Focusing in the first half of the book on the advertisements and in the second half of the book on the …