ELLE UK launched a controversial project this month; editors tapped three ad agencies and three feminist organizations to form an unlikely task force. Their goal? To “re-brand a term that many feel has become burdened with complications and negativity.” That word? Feminist.
The fruits of this collaboration are on newsstands now, the feminist-themed November issue featuring glossy, full-page ads for feminism. Glib, eye-catching and meme-ready, these graphics dispatch with anti-feminist stereotypes, challenge the gender wage gap, and tackle the stigmas associated with the contentious “F” word. The question ELLE poses, “Does feminism need re-branding?” has elicited upward of 80 million tweets and counting.
Interestingly, what ELLE UK is doing today—attempting to refresh the feminist image as a mainstream mainstay is not unprecedented. In the early 1900s, the first women’s photographic magazine in France, Femina (a forerunner of ELLE) took on a similar mission. Working against the bicycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, pants-wearing caricature of the oft-derided New Woman, Femina promised in its very first issue (February 1901) to steer clear of any talk of emancipation or women’s rights, for fear of “masculinizing women and robbing them of their exquisite charm.”
Instead, their publication, dedicated to women's “vast and magnificent domain,” showed female achievement in multiple—and always lovely—new iterations. From corseted “sportswomen” to well-robed lawyers, dashing doctoresses and impossibly elegant writers, these were new women in everything but name and, perhaps, attire. Femina enabled the celebration of multiple new forms of women’s achievement, while skirting around the New Woman label—and, at the same time, made those achievements visible and desirable to huge numbers of women through the powerful engine of the mass press (see this Slate article for examples of Femina's modern women icons).
Through their regular opinion surveys, expert debates, and writing contests, Femina built an enormous community of engaged women readers who were taught not just to admire the women celebrated by the magazine, but to imitate them. Look at this fabulous woman writer/lawyer/doctor/tennis player, the editors would urge—and don’t you, dear reader, see a little bit of yourself in her? The tens of thousands of responses they would receive for their surveys and contests (on everything from “would you rather be a man” to “what’s the best profession for women”) are roughly analogous to the 80 million tweets hashtagged to ELLE’s debate. Through their strategic “rebranding,” both magazines, a century apart from one another, have managed to get an impressive number of women talking to each other about what they can achieve.
So how does ELLE UK's campaign measure up to Femina's embrace of the achieving modern woman?
Despite their promotion of myriad images of female success, Femina’s ideal remained fairly restricted: the ideal modern woman balanced femininity and feminism, equality with conventional notions of femininity. Images of women at work were juxtaposed with women holding babies: work-life balance necessitated a careful equilibrium, and the constant proof that professional success would not jeopardize family life or traditional feminine ideals.
ELLE, by contrast, is less concerned with mediating feminist ideals with the assurance that traditional feminine norms ought to endure. While the rebrand is launched via a fashion magazine, squeezed between pages of unfathomably lean models wearing outlandishly priced clothing, ELLE’s mission still seems less limiting than its forebears (like Femina) or more recent precursor stunts (like Dove’s Real Beauty campaign). ELLE’s message seems to be that feminists can be beautiful, even if they don’t have to be; this feminism is about choice.
“I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible,” actress Natalie Portman declares in the magazine. Editor-in-chief Lorrain Candy echoes her sentiment: “Women should have the freedom to be themselves without box-ticking.” ELLE’s expansion of the feminist umbrella far surpasses Femina’s analogous mission 100 years prior.
In fact, despite the provocation of rebranding, ELLE’s message turns out to be less about the feminist label, and more about expanding and projecting women’s voices (e.g. their “ask him what he makes” campaign); it’s connected to a new speak-up-and-stand-up-for-yourself feminism that we are seeing in everything from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Tina Fey’s Bossypants (my personal favorite work of recent feminist criticism), who, like Portman, are not afraid of the “F” word. But celebrity feminists are not enough, as both both Femina and ELLE realized. You also need to give women a means through which they can lean in themselves, and make their own voices heard. And that, dear reader, is worth tweeting about.
Rachel Mesch is an Associate Professor of French at Yeshiva University and author of the recent book, Having It All in the Belle Époque: How French Women's Magazines Invented the Modern Woman as well as The Hysteric's Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle.
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