From Fem to Fam?

What happened to Chatelaine?



Chatelaine is currently the number one women’s magazine in Canada, with Jane Francisco as Editor-in-chief. As of 2009, according to figures from the Print Measurement Bureau, Chatelaine’s current total readership was 938,000. Chatelaine has a paid circulation of 553,000 and publishes articles on topics such as recipes, health, relationships, family, and beauty.

Created as a feminist publication that allowed women to discuss sexist issues in a public forum, Chatelaine was culturally appropriate during its conception in 1928, and well into the 70s. However, with different editors over the years, and changing spirit of the times, the feminist angle that Chatelaine was known for has gotten lost in the shuffle of other content.

Originally called The Chatelaine, with Anne Elizabeth Wilson as Editor-in-Chief, and Maclean Hunter as publisher, Chatelaine began with a circulation of 57,053 copies in Canada. This was a time when women’s issues and political rights were being contested in society, and in her book Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties, Valerie Korinek says that Chatelaine was a “‘closet’ feminist magazine.” Women had won the right to vote a decade earlier and the Person’s Case was being fought before the courts as the first issues of the magazine were in readers’ hands.

In the September 1933 issue, then member of the Québec Legislative Council, Mederic Martin, wrote an article titled “Go Home Young Woman,” in which he told women that it was their “patriotic duty” to forfeit paid employment. The next month, journalist Agnes MacPhail wrote a response to this article titled “Go Home Young Woman? Ha! Ha!” criticising Martin. The editor’s decision to run both articles is exemplary of Chatelaine’s nature – to remain traditional, but also condemn patriarchal values and beliefs.

“‘Everybody had Chatelaine and men thought it was harmless – all about Easter hats. It was far from that. It was like lighting up a brush fire. It was wonderful,’” June Callwood once said, of the magazine.

Doris McCubbin Anderson’s reign as Editor-in-chief from 1957-77 was the highlight of Chatelaine’s days as a feminist magazine. A devoted women’s rights activist and journalist, Anderson ensured her readers were receiving information about real women and the issues they were up against, such as the wage gap and access to birth control.

In a 2006 interview with journalist Lisa Rundle from Herizons magazine, Anderson, then 84, said “I was a feminist long before the word had been invented . . . And I decided that the one thing we had going for us as a Canadian magazine . . . was to tell Canadian women what was happening in Canada.”



Anderson was well-known for her feminist viewpoint and her political efforts to adopt proportional representation as an election method. “It was jarring at first to see her editorials on abortion appearing alongside recipes. But the packaging of the forward-thinking with the traditional is so . . . logical,” said Rundle, in the Herizons interview.

Anderson fought hard to establish the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which was achieved in 1967. Anderson provided women with a progressive magazine that encouraged them to think for themselves and gave them a public space in which to do so. At a time when most women’s magazines were only publishing articles on what to cook the family for dinner, Chatelaine was publishing articles that discussed lesbianism, exposed women’s poverty, and pushed for change in women’s lives. The second wave of the Feminist Movement – a social and political effort to end inequalities among the sexes in the workplace, family, and over reproductive rights - was emerging at this time. Chatelaine was publishing pieces that informed women and stimulated their minds. Anderson used the magazine as a medium for feminist change and action.

The most notable feature of Chatelaine was the intimate relationship it created between readers and editors. Articles accounted for 15 per cent of the magazine’s content, and were often written in an intimate tone, seeming as though it was a woman-to-woman conversation. Seventy per cent of the articles that appeared in Chatelaine were written by women, tended to be short, and were about topics such as gender, private and public life.

Women responded positively to these types of articles, and the numbers showed it. CBC News reported in 2007 that in the 20 years Anderson served as editor-in-chief, Chatelaine’s circulation tripled. By 1987, Chatelaine’s circulation was 1, 359, 090.

Chatelaine did publish more traditional editorial content that other women’s magazines, such as Canadian Living were publishing, like recipes and home decor. “We tried to balance all this feminist stuff. We ran food and fashion like every other magazine . . . but we also tackled things that astound me now – we tackled lesbianism and sex,” said Anderson.

Journalism Program Director at Ryerson University, Ivor Shapiro, has served as both Executive Editor (1991-94) and Managing Editor (1995-97) at Chatelaine. He has answered to Editors Mildred Istona and Rona Maynard.

“The vision of the magazine under Rona was . . . about women’s possibilities . . . the longer she was there, the more focused she became on that positive forward looking thing,” says Shapiro.

The feminist content that Anderson had worked so hard to print, continued to exist with these editors in charge, but in a less overt way.

“I think we took feminism for granted,” says Shapiro. “Women’s choice was assumed on every level. The concept was, that we were providing a magazine for the whole woman, and the whole woman cooks sometimes, does her makeup sometimes, chooses her clothes sometimes, thinks about how her house looks sometimes, but the whole woman is bigger than that. She does that, but she does more than that. She’s interested in politics and she’s interested in life on the planet earth and the environment and everything else anybody’s interested in.”

The editors at Chatelaine had to combine this message with the universal headlines for all women’s service magazines – Fashion, Beauty, Decor, and Food. “A lot of us weren’t particularly excited about that, but that’s what kept the magazine in business,” says Shapiro.

“In the 1970s, Chatelaine was an early feminist magazine with demands about equality, but that has disappeared,” says Helen Ramirez, Women’s Studies professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. The new demographic is women ages 25-49, but Chatelaine also carries a significant demographic of women ages 18-34. Chatelaine has undergone significant changes since Anderson’s reign.

Heterosexual relationships remain the main point of reference for Chatelaine’s relationship advice articles. A November 16 online article titled “How to make him Harry to your Sally,” and a November 17 online article titled “What to do when nobody likes Your Man,” only speaks to heterosexual women.

The question stands, then: Why isn’t Chatelaine still a feminist magazine?

“A magazine goes through many stages,” says Shapiro. “It just keeps on morphing.” Shapiro says the ‘feature well,’ of Chatelaine, where long-form journalism such as investigations and feature articles appear, dealt with real problems concerning women, and was an essential part of Chatelaine when he worked under Maynard and Istona. In the September 1998 issue, the feature well took up 45 pages, and after it began the headlines on Fashion, Beauty, Decor, and Food. That has changed now, he says. “The last time I looked at Chatelaine – right now, the feature well is really, really, not important to the magazine.”

Each editor brought a personal vision to Chatelaine that played a significant role in shaping the content, as seen during Anderson’s time as editor-in-chief, when Chatelaine served as a catalyst for feminist activism, thought, and change.

While some might attribute the decline in Anderson’s vision to the successive editors of Chatelaine, there are many factors that contributed to this. Shapiro says that United States women’s magazines became heavy competition for Chatelaine, and as readers of the 60s and 70s grew older, Chatelaine had to cater to a new audience of women.

“The problem that began to face the editors of Chatelaine was the perception out there . . . somewhere in the late 90s, that this was the people’s mother’s magazine and once that’s out there, you’ve got a problem,” says Shapiro.

Along with this was an internal issue that Chatelaine faced. A disagreement over editorial changes in 2005 between Chatelaine’s publisher Kerry Mitchell and then Editor-in-chief, Kim Pittaway, resulted in Pittaway’s resignation.

“A magazine must have a soul. When one person says ‘Our soul lies in making women feel beautiful and good about themselves,’ and another publisher or editor says ‘No, our soul lies in making women feel empowered to take command of their lives or to understand their world better,’ you’ve got a mess on your hands, and someone’s going to have to win this battle before the magazine knows what it is, and before the reader knows what it is,” says Shapiro.

“Things get very wrong when the publisher and the editor have two different visions for the magazine.”

Angela McLean, 36, manager of Shoppers Drug Mart in Exeter, Ont., says “In Chatelaine, I feel that [women] are mothers who are career driven and who work outside of the home and manage the house with their spouse.”

Jacqueline Clausius, 45, reader of Chatelaine says that “The first thing I look for in a woman’s magazine is recipes. They have easy, delicious recipes, as I like to provide fun food for my family that does not take a lot of time to prepare since, I work full time.”

The portrayal of women in women’s magazines has come a long way. Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Living, Susan Antonacci, says “Women in the 50s were portrayed as homemakers who spent their days cleaning, cooking, and making lives comfortable for their husbands. As women started to get into the work force, earn money and independence, it also gave them a new power. Women became more open and opinionated, sharing ideas and stories more openly.”

While women are currently presented in most magazines as being in the workforce, it is somewhat taken for granted. Andi Zeisler, co-founder and Editorial Director of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, says that “the references to work-life are very casual . . . magazines are functioning on the archetypal chicklit [sic] heroine . . . this woman is a striver [sic] in the workplace.”

With Chatelaine’s abandonment of feminist editorials came a new women’s magazine in 1996 that attempted to bring feminism back into the minds of readers. Bitch: Feminist Response to Popular Culture is an American feminist magazine that critiques products of popular culture, such as television shows and advertisements, and offers women an alternative form of media to consume. Zeisler and co-founder Lisa Jervis named the magazine “Bitch” in order to try to take back the word, and redefine it as a strong, powerful, and assertive woman.

“In 1996, it felt effective,” says Zeisler. “It felt like an edgy move with revolutionary potential . . . but this was before hip-hop culture made ‘bitch’ . . . a bad word, before ‘bitch’ started to be used by men to other men,” she says.

Chatelaine shouldn’t necessarily be damned for its move towards the more mainstream universal women’s magazine headlines. “A varied media-diet is essential,” says Zeisler. “I wouldn’t condemn the pleasure of picking up Glamour or Marie Claire. I do it, but it’s important to have a breadth of subject, subscribe to different magazines and get something out of each of them,” she says.

The magazine industry is currently facing some of its most challenging times, with the economic recession and the growing tendency towards online publications. The need to sell may result in content that is less critical and more mainstream.

Chatelaine proved its ability in the 1950s and 70s to provide women with mainstream, gender stereotypical articles, as well as hard-hitting journalism that brought women’s issues and concerns into a public space, open for critique and consumption. While it now publishes similar topics to other women’s service magazines, Doris Anderson’s approach reminded female readers that it is perfectly okay to be a woman who cares as much about cooking as she does about her right to have an abortion.