'Smells like teen spirit':
Exploring gender, media, and culture through Jackie magazine

Introduction

Selling over a million copies each week at its peak, the teen magazine Jackie was a cultural touchstone for British girls from 1964 to 1993. However, Jackie is also an unmissable resource for scholars and researchers exploring the ways in which media shaped and informed teenage girls in Britain during some of the most transformative decades of the twentieth century. This blog highlights some of the academic topics, disciplines, and potential research projects Jackie can support within Higher Education.

Girls' studies

Jackie has been and remains a fundamental source of study for girls' studies and girls' media studies. The magazine was, in fact, at the centre of the development of the discipline, having been the subject of exploration by pioneering researcher Angela McRobbie from the late 1970s onwards.¹ Jackie was not only targeted at a female audience (enabling the exploration of reception of the media, as well as the constructions of discourse) but also had among its writers and editors a significant number of young women, making it an unmissable primary source for the field.²

Gender studies

The rise in popularity of teen magazines for young girls during the twentieth century was an expansion of a broader phenomenon: the emergence throughout the nineteenth century of newspapers aimed exclusively at a female audience.³ These new forms of media not only became an intrinsic part of the upbringing of a new generation but also actively contributed to creating, shaping, solidifying, and modifying cultural and social behaviours around young girls and women.

For instance, Jackie dedicated several articles to highlighting possible career paths for young girls, including nursing, office jobs, and modelling. Likewise, the content of these teenage magazines also shaped other significant gender-based attitudes and roles, including views on beauty, diet culture, and wellbeing. As such, Jackie provides sharp insights for researchers exploring the ways in which gender was constructed and shaped within British culture throughout the twentieth century.

Fandom studies

Jackie was, since its inception, a magazine that followed and promoted some of the biggest names in the music industry throughout the swinging sixties, the seventies, and the eighties. Moreover, it actively mediated pop culture fandom through posters, pin-ups, and freebies. As such, it serves as a key source for understanding mainstream and popular culture, as well as the rise and fall of stars, fans, and fandoms.

Cultural history, media and communication

Established as the best-known British teenage magazine soon after its first appearance, Jackie became a cultural phenomenon that contributed to shaping and creating some of the key elements of youth imagination. This included contributions such as the 'Cathy 'n' Claire Page', an agony aunt section where readers could write in with their problems. By the 1970s, this agony aunt page had become as much a cultural phenomenon as the magazine it appeared in, receiving around 400 letters a week from Jackie readers, who were typically aged between 10 and 16.⁴

Jackie was also pioneering in its inclusion of a horoscope, a feature now commonplace. Cultural historians of twentieth-century Britain will find in its more than 51,000 pages an incredibly rich resource to explore the multiple ways in which Jackie informed and shaped the culture of the time.

Scholars in the field of media and journalism, particularly those in periodical studies, will also find in Jackie a key piece of evidence for their research and teaching, as the magazine, published by DC Thomson, underwent significant transformations during its run. It started as a weekly publication with 24 pages and its page count increased over the decades, reaching 40 pages by its final issue in 1993.⁵ This presents a fascinating opportunity to explore the entirety of this periodical, which rose to become one of the most popular magazines in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

By providing access to every edition of Jackie ever published, The Social History Archive opens a new window into the study of gender studies, girls' studies, and cultural history in Britain, making Jackie fully browsable and searchable on a single platform for the very first time. No publicly held collection, including those of the British Library or the National Library of Scotland, holds a complete collection of the magazine. The earliest years are not available in any other public collection, making this the only full set in existence. This incredible resource will be of pivotal importance to researchers and students alike.

Footnotes

1. (1)Angela McRobbie, 'Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity', in Bernard Waites, Tony Bennet and Graham Martin (eds.), Popular Culture: Past and Present (London, 1982); Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From 'Jackie' to 'Just Seventeen' (Boston, 1991).
2. (2)See the works and methods referenced in Mary Celeste Kearney, 'Girls' Media Studies', Feminist Media Histories, 4:2 (2018), 90-94; and Mary Celeste Kearney, 'Coalescing: The Development of Girls' Studies', NWSA Journal, 21:1 (Spring 2009), 1-28.
3. (3)See more about those newspapers and how to access them in The Social History Archive in Paula Del Val Vales, 'For her eyes only: Nineteenth-century ladies' newspapers', The Social History Archive, (2025), https://www.thesocialhistoryarchive.com/editorial/nineteenth-century-ladies-newspapers. On adolescent magazines, see Dawn H. Currie, Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and their Readers (Toronto, 1995); Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge, 2007).
4. (4)Rose Goodall, 'Hot Off the Press' - New Titles this Week', British Newspaper Archive Blog (6 October 2025), https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2025/10/06/jackie-joins-the-archive/. On girlhood and culture, see Catherine Driscoll, Girls' Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York, 2002).
5. (5)Rose Goodall, 'Hot Off the Press' - New Titles this Week', British Newspaper Archive Blog (6 October 2025), https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2025/10/06/jackie-joins-the-archive/.

Author

Dr Paula Del Val Vales is Senior Content Curator at The Social History Archive, where she oversees the curation of thematic digital collections of primary sources. With a background in medieval history, Paula is dedicated to amplifying women's voices and stories across time.

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