To these women, working mothers meant bad mothers.Īnother reason for the lack of clear focus in Playgirl was its publishing history. Many continued to believe that husbands should work and wives should stay home and care for the family. How could she aspire to 'the good life' when her wages were often half that of her male counterpart? Women themselves were divided on the issues. Could a woman retain her femininity or did she have to ape a man to succeed in a man's world? Her wages were certainly arguing that she could not compete on equal terms with men. The magazine's lack of identity reflected the fact that women themselves were struggling to find and assert their identity during the 1970s and 1980s. And on the nudity question, it wavered between the extremes of full frontal and none at all. While aspiring to emulate Playboy, in its early years Playgirl periodically featured silly centerfolds, such as actor Rip Torn and Benji the dog. Its fiction, although at times featuring such notable authors as Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, rarely rose higher than romance novels and confession magazines, while Playboy's fiction often featured the top writers of the day, and it featured interviews with Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Warren Beatty, and Jane Fonda, to name a few. Perhaps this is because of the fact that Playgirl always had trouble deciding what kind of magazine it wanted to be. It desired to offer women 'the good life,' much as Playboy identified a way of life that encompassed the music their male readers listened to, the books they read, the cars they drove-and the women who fed their fantasies.īy the late 1990s, although Playgirl could boast a circulation of more than 500,000, this was still nowhere near the much larger circulation figures for Cosmopolitan and doesn't enter the sphere of circulation occupied by Playboy. While Cosmopolitan may have pushed at the far edges of women's magazines, Playgirl went over the line in its effort to bring a newly blossomed feminism to the realm of popular reading material.

Although Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan had featured the first nude male centerfold, Playgirl, first published by Douglas Lambert and edited by Marin Scott Milam, was more of a female counterpart to Playboy.

With its appearance on the stands in May 1973, Playgirl magazine became the first magazine for women to focus on men.

Playgirl magazine centerfolds