MAKING TIME
COUNT
by Ramon Roces Arevalo
Counting
time is not so important as making time. For which reason, Women’s Journal, for
the past 18 years, had been dishing out multiple enthusiasms and energies to
turn a woman’s weekly into a truly national journal.
It is not by chance, mind you, that WJ has become a journalistic success.
Basic to this rating is a powerful platform and an intuitive sense of a
changing nation --- that there are more and more better-educated women who need
better and more sharply-honed information.
Part missionary, part revolutionary, WJ has always had a powerful sense of
what women want to read, what is good for them to read and essential belief
that any subject of importance could be made interesting.
Significantly, WJ has broadened the definition of magazine publication to include every
tiny part of the social fabric---medicine, law, politics, art, science, food, home furnishings, cosmetology, old styles, new
fads, etc.---as something newsworthy. On this score, WJ has become as much an educator as a print medium.
At the center of its work is its
involvement in setting up a vehicle to represent and institutionalize la femme
as prime mover of progress.
Given the class consciousness of the
era, WJ has become a sort of national propagandist
for the female species.
It created an institutional balance to
outdistance the tepid, bland and often chauvinistic press in an attempt to
elevate the importance of woman as a powerful socio-economic and
politico-cultural force.
Without doubt, after a millenium of
submission to male domination, women seem to be striking on their own rather
than tie their fate and well-being entirely to the opposite sex. Indeed, one is
startled to observe one of life’s most brutal realities: while men are raising
their hands up in resignation, women’s power is fresh and more secure of late.
True enough, the role of women in
world affairs has become more serious, more complicated and they have become
more influential and prestigious.
That alone has been one of the crucial
decisions that helped WJ’s editorial
policy.
Of course, the upward movement of
women on the social ladder is not an isolated phenomenon. It is happening
everywhere.
Women have hurdled the barriers
erected to obstruct them from acquiring co-equal status with men. Alas,
entrenched old guards need to put mechanisms to put mechanisms to put
challengers in their place.
Yet, like it or not, women’s rise in
stature has strengthened society.
It might be noted that women have
their own fairly rigid hierarchy of status, too. They have a driving
relentlessness curiosity (“nosey,” say the menfolk) that help them cruise
through the old biases being buffered by the greater freedom of the new
generation.
And with their changing moods
(“Fickle,” men are prone to say), they can turn around with much elasticity to
deal with the terrifying turn of events.
These descendants of Mata Hari are
also skilled at taking people behind the scene (“Devious,” men are opt to
state) to enable them to highly
suitable and favorable to them and thus, dominate the scenario.
If they have shed-off rough edges of
discrimination, it is because women know the real meaning of hard work and
sacrifice and deprivation to validate their upward social mobility.
Hence, the need for a medium which
serious and respected women would want to read.
For this WJ has brought in an
extraordinary assortment of talents and skills to ensure that the medium would
help women fulfill and match their responsibilities.
For eighteen years, WJ has
continuously exhibited a devotion to every detail of journalism which made the
magazine a living-aid to its multifarious, multi-fronted readers. For almost
two decades, it has lived up to its reputation as an imaginative magazine able
to see the future and carve it up.
It is a successful piece of
literature, it is because it has a natural feel of what women want---a strong
sense of the nature of its readers.
Quite significantly, WJ has
personalized issues so that its readers could become issues so that its readers
could become more interested and more involved in serious reading matters.
The medium enjoys staggering business
prestige, as well, for it has become a garden where genius seems to flower, not
only in the literary field but, fittingly enough in sales and promotions.
Indeed the modern woman has emerged
right at the center of one of the era’s most powerful forces---consumerism.
Very simply, WJ has been pivotal in the merchandising of more products and
promoting of more companies and services than most magazines of its genre.
A ceaseless stream of advertising
materials had been beamed into a new into a new marketplace, relentlessly
selling an endless series of women, children, household and even male-oriented
products and services.
For years on end, WJ and its readers have enjoyed a friendship bound to each other by
a transcending common experience which had evoked the best of each other.
They have identified with each other
and listened to one another. And this has sealed the bond between them.
What’s in store for the next
generation of WJ readers?
Plenty. For WJ has an immediacy to events, a passion to life and has an almost
electric connection to it.
Indeed, WJ clients can brace themselves to better materials in the years
ahead. For, as far as WJ staffers and
contributors are concerned, the magazine is not just an enterprise. Nor is it
just a matter of journalism. Women’s
Journal to them is a cause.
In a word, WJ continues to serve the voice of womanhood---very human, with a
large vision to help women acquire a total sense of themselves to enable them
to ward off assaults upon their persons and diminution of their privileges.
By any stretch of imagination, WJ continues to be a comprehensive and
popular medium and a public trust to reflect and represent the growing concerns
and vital interests of women.
(FYI. My apologies for lifting this article from Women's Journal. This is a good piece and I just want to share this to everyone. snc)
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