In this survey of British and American romance fiction, Cecil catalogues the different types of heroines that have appeared in women's magazines from 1750 to 1974. The chapters are arranged chronologically by character types, and are followed by a reprint of a magazine story [or an excerpt from one in the cases of longer stories] representative of each period. Cecil stresses that magazine heroines have always conformed to conventional ideas about women, and notes the influence of novelistic heroines on magazine fiction. Eighteenth-century romance fiction, modeled on Richardson's Clarissa, was preoccupied with how its heroines avoided sex. Victorian women's magazines, such as America's Godey's Lady's Book (1830-98), provided middle-class women with standards of propriety and purity. In the 1950s, "the happy housewife heroine" appeared in McCall's and other magazines. Cecil concludes her study with the sexual realism of Cosmopolitan, aimed at yet a different type of reader. (1235)
Here's an excerpt, from the introduction:
The message of magazine fiction is eternal - the miracle of love, its magic undimmed over two centuries and more. But fashions in heroines come and go: when magazine fiction first started in the eighteenth century the climax of a good story was the heroine kicking and screaming and fighting for her virtue (... and did Mr Right enter in the nick of time to save her? That was always 'continued in our next'). But a little while later, towards the end of the century, under the influence of the cult of sensibility, the heroine was too pale and delicate for any but the gentlest transports of love, and the hero was an equally ready weeper.
At the same time the Gothic Horrors caught hold of readers' imaginations, and soon every heroine longed to be incarcerated by some mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know villain in his haunted castle teetering on a remote mountainside. Victorian writers put an end to these horrific tales. They prided themselves on their 'realism' and for the broad span of the nineteenth century, from about 1832-1870, in magazines like The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in England [sic with regards to the italics] and Godey's Lady's Book in America, the heroine was kept at home. Here she was the Angel in the House, the final ornament among the potted palms, antimacassars and elaborate embroidery - much of which she had done herself - of the Victorian home. And here she endured such realistic and day-to-day events as blindness, destitution, the faithlessness of her lover, or the death of her little ones - or sometimes a combination of them all.
By the 1870s emancipation was creeping up on the magazines, and the heroine stepped down from her pedestal and out into the world. In England she went bicycling - in a divided skirt, without a chaperone; in America she went so far as to live away from home in a flat in the big city with her girlfriends and even to take a job. While in England the reaction away from the Victorian heroine was at its most extreme with the arrival of Ouida-esque femmes fatales who set Society ablaze with their beauty and their 'reputation', in America the most emancipated girls were the suffragette heroines at the beginning of this century.
Heroines played a staunch part in the First World War, and after it they became truly 'modern': they smoked, drank cocktails, danced whenever and wherever they could and drove their own cars. Some were even divorced. For the first time unhappy endings were allowed and it was smart for heroines to be disillusioned with love and marriage.
It did not last: by the Second World War old-fashioned romance was back, and with it old-fashioned heroines. During this war, more than during the previous one, stories were used very much as propaganda to sustain women watching and working at home and their heroines were patriotic and courageous. But afterwards there was none of the sudden burst of emancipation that there had been in the twenties: heroines of the 1940s and 1950s, in magazines like Woman, Woman's Own, Ladies' Home Journal and McCalls were 'happy-house-wife heroines', as much 'little women' as their Victorian predecessors. They found their romance by the washing-line and at the sink and looked for no wider horizons.
The roses did not stay round the door for ever: they were pulled down, in the 1960s, by 'permissiveness'. New magazines - Honey, Petticoat, Rave, and 19, for instance - were started for the young market. For the first time sex entered romance, and heroines loved it. Once more we find them flat on their backs on the sofa - but now embracing Mr Right rather than fighting off Mr Wrong. This was not true of the older-established women's magazines, but even there 'realism', sex especially has found a place in fiction.
After a few years of knocking romance, however, the young magazines have just now called back the bluebird of happiness to hover over at least a few endings. For romance can never be kept out of magazine fiction. Despite all the changes the heroine's goal is constant - love, true love. She is waiting for Mr, or preferably Lord, Right; Mr Alright will not do. (11-13)
From American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography, Volume 2, edited by Jack Salzman:
Here's an excerpt, from the introduction: