The glory, and flaws, of working in women's magazines

Tales of a bygone era

The editors in chief I worked for in women’s magazines all possessed hidden talents. One previously had a career singing scat in the jazz scene, and had appeared on a popular game show. One had a small role in the movie Caddy Shack when she was a teenager. All of these women were glamorous, and, more importantly, wise in the ways of navigating tricky, competitive, cut-throat interoffice politics where the constant revolving door meant someone was waiting in the wings to take your position in the La Mer-scented corner offices if just one cover did badly on the newsstand.

Being in the orbit of these multi-faceted, talented women taught me much in my early days of my career in magazines. One of my bosses advised me to be myself, that Anna would come to know and respect me over time, but also warned that she’d mop the counter with anyone who would let her, so to set boundaries — a concept I had never heard of. Another called me into her office after an arrogant French art director had a temper tantrum, and she told me I never had to endure his behavior, and was owed an apology. Most of these women had families, many with young children, and prioritized facilitating a workflow that allowed them to leave the office whenever it was necessary to balance their home and work responsibilities — including having to attend events at night, looking absolutely fabulous, and showing up fresh and sharp the next day.

Though it’s true that in order to maintain your place on the masthead you had to be savvy, polished, and could never let your guard down or else you’d be standing in front of the elevators holding a box of your possessions, the thing that surprises people the most, when I tell them what it was like to work in the most competitive, successful publishing houses during the height of glossy magazines, is how supportive the women I worked with were of each other. In one magazine that rhymes with Pogue, contrary to what one might think, there was never any finger pointing when things went wrong. If Anna killed a story two days before we went to press, as she was often wont to do, no one wasted any time blaming anyone, we simply rallied all our considerable resources to do the needful to fill the holes, the quality of the pages uncompromised.

It’s not that there weren’t conflicts or challenges — of course there were — in order to succeed in this career you needed to have charisma and that comes with big personalities that often conflicted. Still, an art director I worked with, who was the biggest pain in my ass with all her diva nonsense, stopped me in the hallway because I was on the verge of tears and she grabbed me by my elbow and steered me into the privacy of her office and I told her that I’d just gotten off the phone with my gynecologist who had called to say my biopsy had come back positive for high-grade dysplasia due to HPV and I’d need a leep procedure, and I started crying and said “Is this because I’m a slut?” and she hugged me and said, “Yes, darling, but it’s okay, we are all sluts and you are going to be just fine.”

The women I worked for and with were exceptional and amazing on multiple levels.

The same could not be said of the prestigious magazine where I worked that was helmed by men. Men whose wives didn’t work, or had flexible jobs in service of their husbands so that all the men’s domestic needs — particularly childcare — were met, and the men could and did live in their offices, avoiding the responsibilities of home life, except for the occasional performative task of showing up to a child’s Boy Scout meeting, which these dudes made a huge deal of. These guys gained awards and accolades for publishing pieces about what held women back in the workforce, while obliviously eschewing meetings scheduled during normal business hours (opting instead to indulge in hours-long lunch meetings or an afternoon jog) because they preferred to work long into the evenings, with beers and bourbon.

One late afternoon, my male boss’s wife came to the office, and my boss tried to convince her to stay for an event the magazine was hosting that evening, but she said she’d been away from the house all day and it was too long to leave their kids with a sitter. She turned to me, the only woman at the top of the masthead, perhaps thinking she’d find solidarity but somehow forgetting that I worked there, for her husband, my boss, and said “I mean, what am I supposed to do about making dinner if I’m gone all day?” And I said, “I make a lot of soups,” and she realized, in that moment, that she was an asshole and it was awkward.

I’m still salty about it.

It’s wild to me how a whole generation of women lost their careers when magazines died. Women’s magazines were a bastion of empowerment for working women. Back in the day, you could plot your entire career, from internship to retirement, and have intelligent, dynamic women rising up through the ranks to create the next generation of magazine editors. It’s important to note I’m talking about what went on in the offices to produce the magazines, not what was produced on the page, which is an entirely different subject and we can talk about how women’s magazines set unrealistic beauty standards and ultimately harmed generations of young girls by promoting specific, unattainable body images, not to mention the narrow path of who was able to break into the glittering halls of magazines — you had to have money, for one thing, (or have a specific skill set that paid more, like I did with my technical software production experience, which is how I broke into magazines_) — because entry level magazine jobs paid nothing, and, also, you mostly had to be white. These are shitty, hard truths and must be said when reckoning with the history of women’s magazines.

It all feels like a distant dream. Hazy, hungover, like the morning after a New Year’s Eve party in a Parisian apartment where the air smells of stale cigarettes and the floor is sticky with champagne and sequins and you need an aspirin.

I miss working in women’s magazines. I miss the glamour of the beauty closet, and the thrill of attending a movie premiere and sitting next to the starlet, and the solidarity and support of other women working in concert to create something tangible, and drinking Veuve Clicquot after the last pages were shipped, and going back to my desk, slightly tipsy, and sending out an email to the staff congratulating them on another issue off to press and telling them all to leave the office early — they deserved it, and everyone would.

It was glorious.

I was lucky.

The light is returning to the Netherlands. First signs of Spring, the days are longer, the tulips bloom next month, and it’s almost Shrimpy time.

Note: I originally wrote that my former editor in chief won a bunch of money on the game show she appeared on, but she wrote a note to say she actually went bankrupt on that show. Fact checking! I loved getting this note from her, and I love her. She’s the best!!