Working Woman Magazine Letters
Scope and Contents
The Working Woman Magazine Letters collection consists of published and unpublished letters to the editor, 1979-83. Letters from readers contain critiques on magazine content, suggested changes or additions, information corrections, personal success stories, and commentary on the magazine's mission to tap into a broad range of women's issues in the working world. The letters contain hand written annotations and notes between magazine staff. The annotations include editing marks for publishing, casual exchanges about their content, relevancy for publication in the magazine, and personal reactions from the editors. Copies of responses from Working Woman editors to readers are also included. Also included are photocopies of the "Reader Letters" section of magazine for those years. Published reader letters and original letters are arranged chronologically.
Dates of Materials
- 1979-1983
Creator
- Working Woman Magazine (Organization)
Language of Materials
English
Conditions Governing Access
This collection is open for research use without restriction beyond the standard terms and conditions of Smith College Special Collections. Until May 2022, the collection required signing an access agreement to protect confidentiality.
Conditions Governing Use
To the extent that they own copyright, Working Woman magazine has retained copyright in its works donated to Smith College. Copyright in other items in this collection may be held by their respective creators. For reproductions of materials that are governed by fair use as defined under U. S. Copyright Law, no permission to cite or publish is required. For those few instances beyond fair use, or which may regard materials in the collection not created by Working Woman magazine, researchers are responsible for determining who may hold materials' copyrights and obtaining approval from them. Researchers do not need anything further from Smith College Special Collections to move forward with their use.
Biographical / Historical
First published in November 1976, Working Woman magazine spoke to "women in transition," seeking to "help women work out both the major questions that concern attitudes and ambitions, obstacles and expectations as well as the ordinary bread and butter problems and pleasures of daily life." Founded by Beatrice Buckler from her experience editing Family Circle magazine in the 1970s, Working Woman expanded from 200,000 circulation in 1977 to 575,000 circulation by 1983. Targeting the 38 million American women in the work force in the late 1970s, Working Woman addressed the "adult, sophisticated, newly liberated" professional woman, engaging the mundane, technical, and practical issues of working life. Unlike Ms. magazine, Working Woman avoided overt feminist politics, balancing household and family management for working mothers with content on office politics and career strategies. In 1978, Dale Lang, founder of Media Networks Inc. and later president of Hal Publications, acquired a financially shaky Working Woman. The magazine published its last issue in September 2001, after the 25th anniversary edition.
Extent
0.667 linear feet (2 containers)
Abstract
Collection includes published and unpublished letters to the editor, 1979-83.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Working Woman magazine editor, Gay Bryant, donated the collection to the Sophia Smith Collection in 1983.
Separated Materials
Issues of Working Woman (1980-94) are among the periodicals holdings of the Sophia Smith Collection.
Processing Information
Processed by Megan Yeo, 2015.
- Title
- Working Woman Magazine Letters
- Subtitle
- Finding Aid
- Date
- 2008
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Revision Statements
- 07/26/2017: This resource was modified by the ArchivesSpace Preprocessor developed by the Harvard Library (https://github.com/harvard-library/archivesspace-preprocessor)
- 2017-07-26T17:48:19-04:00: This record was migrated from InMagic DB Textworks to ArchivesSpace.
Repository Details
Part of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History Repository
