Summary

Early Argentinean women’s magazines like El Hogar, Para Ti, and Maribel, in circulation before 1940, contained notes on hygiene and home care, horoscopes, psychological and emotional advice, features on the stars and the famous, and romantic narratives illustrated with drawings and invested with a patriarchal sense of the femininity and social role of women. This format persisted unchanged well into the 1970s.

The appearance of the fotonovela in 1948 made it almost synonymous with women’s magazines, and is the most consequential development in the period. Akin to comic books but illustrated with staged still photographs, it targeted a young, urban, semi-literate, feminine audience. Aptly termed “the press of the heart,” it peddled an iterative storyline centered on the pursuit of true love, that is, marriage. Idilio, released in 1948, pioneered the new subgenre and brought competition to a complacent and stagnated market, as Argentina became a major purveyor of women’s magazines throughout Latin America.

As the fotonovela experienced it greatest success in the 1950s, relentless competition and cyclic economic crisis prefigured its uncertain future. Several important publications went out of business by the middle 1960s. As a sign of the genre’s still but dwindled vitality, in 1957 Anahi and Maria Rosa, published by MHB, introduced a new business model based on the in-house production of fotonovelas and the outsourcing of printing. By 1975 they too ceased circulation.

In 1957, Editorial Abril, the largest publisher of fotonovelas, launched Claudia, with a revisionist interpretation of the patriarchal notions of womanhood proposed by the “press of the heart,” and the absence of fotonovelas. The increasing rejection of its values, combined with radical changes in women’s social aspirations and the gradual popularity of telenovelas, lead to the demise of the fotonovela around 1987.