The women’s magazine, a “modern marriage trap” or a den of die-hard bachelors? The case of La revue moderne and Luc Aubry’s investigations in the 1920s
This article seeks to enrich our understanding of the magazine press in Quebec in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, it considers the representations of love conveyed by this type of periodical and seeks to test the hypothesis that the magazine constitutes a “modern marriage trap.” By examining the surveys conducted by Luc Aubry (pseudonym of Anne-Marie Gleason Huguenin) among male and female readers between 1925 and 1927, it shows that, while the spaces of fiction, consumption and information function mainly in synergy around the scheme of dating and happiness in love, and then in marriage, several elements, far from evolving in isolation from the rest of the magazine, focus on a plural representation of amorous relationships and social statuses. This field of possibilities developed in the magazine reveals a modernity in which marriage, highly valued in the French-Canadian Catholic social space, is not the only possible avenue for young people, and where the representation of the single person is not only mocked by the public discourse.