Revista de Letras - Utad

From the Bible to Cosmopolitan… 133
After this brief sojourn throughout history, this paper aims to offer a
preliminary exploration of the socialization of women through the study of the
WOMAN AS CHICKEN metaphor in widely read teenage and women’s
magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Nineteen or CosmoGirl. For this
purpose, the “GREAT CHAIN OF BEING” metaphor (Lakoff & Turner 1989)
along with ethnobiological (Wierbizcka 1996, Martsa 1999, 2003),
anthropological (Leach 1979) and cultural classifications of animals (Harris
1985) will be used as a framework for the study of the metaphorical uses of
chick and hen in these sort of publications. This will be followed by an analysis
of a corpus of linguistic metaphors extracted from teenage and women’s
magazines, which are then discussed in relation to language and socialization.
II. - From the Bible to Cosmopolitan
Before dealing with the metaphor under discussion, a preliminary note
about the title of the article needs to be made. As the reader may have noticed,
“From the Bible to Cosmopolitan” reflects the wide span of time in which the
WOMAN AS CHICKEN metaphor has evolved in Western culture. Yet, at the
same time, it also tries to be a humorous remark about the influence of this
women’s magazine in our society, especially from a feminine perspective. In
fact, having been defined as “the Bible for women” (Gauntlett 2002, Gough-
Yates 2003, Machin 2005), the magazine Cosmopolitan erected as the advocate
of women’s rights at the time when women, having achieved suffrage, were
leaving the traditional domestic sphere and roles of mother and wife to enter the
work market, gaining, therefore, personal as well as financial independence
(Gauntlett 2002). In the struggle for self-definition, the so-called “women’s
magazines” started to proliferate to cater for the needs of what was labeled as
“the new woman” (Nicholas & Price 1998, Gough-Yates 2003). Woman’s Own,
Vogue, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, among many others,
helped women make sense of their collective experiences by providing models
for women to follow. The pages of these publications covered a wide selection
of topics ranging from trivial issues such as make-up tricks to more serious
concerns affecting women’s health through fashion articles, sexual relations,
cooking, dieting, travelling, parenting or job-seeking.
The circulation of these publications gradually increased and women’s
magazines started to expand their readership by targeting a new audience:
teenagers. In fact, adolescents, who began to enjoy quite a lot of money and
leisure time, provided a rich market for the media. Modeled upon the versions of
the more mature women’s magazines, spin-off publications such as CosmoGirl,
You or Nineteen started to proliferate with a very similar goal, namely, to
provide models for teenagers to follow.