Eve’s Weekly Vol 33, No 23, June 9-15, 1979

The Ammu Joseph Collection currently contains 179 Eve's Weekly (EW) magazines. EW, a leading Indian women’s magazine, began publication in 1949 in Bombay (now Mumbai); it was one of the four magazines owned and published by the J.K. Somani Group. This collection brings together EW editions published between the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Ammu Joseph was Assistant Editor of the magazine. EW ceased publication in the late 1980s. The magazine provides an invaluable historical record of post-Independence India’s print culture, gender politics and middle-class social life. Published for several decades and widely read across urban India, the magazine documented changing ideas of womanhood/femininity, fashion, marriage,domesticity, sexuality, work and citizenship. It brought together journalism, fiction, advice columns, humour columns, photo features, coverage of cinema and social events, guides to fashion,needlecraft and cooking, as well as readers’ letters, offering historians rich insights into the everyday worlds and aspirations of women readers of the time. The digital copies of EW in this collection are additionally valuable as a resource that provides glimpses into the changes taking place in Indian women’s lives during a period marked by growing consciousness about the need for women’s liberation/empowerment and for questioning the prevailing patriarchal order. The late 1970s and early 80s witnessed the emergence of the contemporary women’s movement and feminist public discourse in India. Print media, including women’s magazines, were the main source of information and ideas for the public at the time, before the expansion of television and, later, the advent of digital media.

Traditionally seen primarily as a commercial publication reaching out to urban, educated Indian women who were also consumers of goods and services, the magazine evolved during this period into a platform that sought to expose its readers to contemporary debates about women’s roles in families and society, about gender-based hierarchies and barriers, about women’s autonomy, and about current affairs, laws & policies, modernity, consumption and more. Thus, this collection of Eve’s Weekly at a particular moment in its history and that of the country provides a rare view of the social, cultural and political change happening in India at the time, as well as public conversations around a range of related subjects.