Femina (France)

[3] It presented a balanced mix of reportage on fashion, the arts and current events, with generous coverage of leisure activities, especially sports (the cover of April 1, 1902, shows the photograph of two women playing ping pong and another magazine published by Lafitte, La Vie au vent, catered to women sports enthusiasts),[4] and professional advice on interior decoration.

[4] To a question about their notion of what income would support “la vie idéale" readers nominated a minimum twenty thousand francs per annum, ten times the typical salary of a teacher.

[citation needed] After having suspended publication in 1917, Pierre Lafitte sold his title to Hachette, who merged it with La Vie heureuse, keeping the name Femina and launching a new monthly formula in January 1922.

[citation needed] Femina reappeared as a luxurious version quarterly and with out-of-series editions in colour from 1945, sometimes illustrated by significant artists, before disappearing after a number dated December 1953-January 1954.

"However, Femina was always feminine and occasionally even feminist, given that advances of that time including the suffragettes' demands in England, and achievement of the right to vote by Danish women, were issues discussed in the magazine.

During the First World War it was published only intermittently, but in the 1920s increased its popularity as a modern magazine, displacing old-fashioned rivals such as Le Moniteur de la Mode which closed in 1913 and new luxury titles, like the French edition of Vogue (1920-), as Femina increasingly featured high fashion and much less reportage, and by the mid-twenties was image-oriented, and concerned primarily with a modern lifestyle of seasonal leisure and fashion.

Through the 1930s Femina evoked fantasy and desire before information, necessity or practicality, offering the modem woman's magazine formulae of escapist and unattainable visual spectacle to a more diverse and younger female readership.