Contesting Woman: "Spare Rib. A Women’s Liberation Magazine" (1972-1993)

The British magazine "Spare Rib" (July 1972-January 1993) is analyzed as a site of struggle and contestation by and for women. When it was first published (in 1972 in London), "Spare Rib" was a ‘liminal’ magazine: it was the product of the late-sixties counter-culture movements and of consumer society, as it aimed at putting “women’s liberation on the newsstands” (Rosie Parker, Spare Rib 84, July 1978) by employing the expressive strategies of mainstream women’s magazines (such as "Cosmopolitan", "Nova", or "Woman’s Own"). In over twenty years of publication, "Spare Rib"’s all-woman editorial boards articulated different ways of looking at women and of defining woman. In the Seventies, they contested traditional representations of woman, and proposed alternative (i.e. feminist) ones, which could accommodate all women. Since the beginning of the Eighties, "Spare Rib" editorial policy reflected the shift in women’s politics, when black and lesbian feminists stigmatized the silences, differences, and controversies shadowed by the all-encompassing Women’s Liberation Movement ideals of womanhood and sisterhood. Likewise, the universality of the mainstream feminist representations of woman and the unifying voice of the magazine were put into question. The 239 issues of "Spare Rib" epitomized this tension between the impossibility to satisfactorily represent woman and the awareness that representing this very impossibility lay (and still lies) at the core of feminist politics.