Emilia Ferrara

Mag World Emilia Ferrara

"Not every woman can be a beauty, but every woman can behave like a beauty," wrote Mrs. Walter Sohier in Vogue's February issue, 1950. These words may seem ancient to the iPhone-tapping, degree-earning, Oprah-celebrating women of our day, but has the message behind these words really left us? Magazines first started earning million dollar revenues in the 1970s and yet, 40 years later, media remains a chilly, disciplined and sometimes even painful world for women - most especially, for girls. Emilia Ferrara was a captive magazine reader, pouring through every page of every issue, month after month, in her teens through to college. However, as her passion for journalism grew, her inclination to serve the female reader through female titles waned. She repelled from their frivolous narratives and unhealthy standards. As she studied at Columbia's Journalism School and began researching how the beauty, fashion and magazine industries impact young girls, she began to write her first book: Mag World. Mag World is an non-fiction text that threads together voices such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Lippman and Tina Fey. Ferrara speculates over the future of girls as readers, much like Woolf imagined the future of women writers. She challenges intricate details of modern journalistic practices, adjacent to Lippmann's review on his day. And her hopeful (and sometimes humorous) tone echoes Fey's ability to deliver a positive critique. Written with both vision and forgiveness, Mag World is a melodic call for reform, a handshake to editors and an inspiration to today's girls who stand to inherit the future.