A search of women's magazines yields countless missives on the virtues of female vigilance not only in protecting personal health but also in protecting spouse and family health. Indeed, the face and content of women's magazines has changed remarkably little from their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, which circumscribed the ideology of femininity and family to the domestic arena of home and family. Kathryn Shevelov explains that the women's magazine creates a community "of and around the text," reflecting its readers and constructing much of their social reality. Consequently, female readers experience their gender through the mirror of the women's magazine regardless of the extent to which that mirror reflects or distorts reality. Today's magazines counsel women to educate themselves about men's health. One analysis of language and gender in women's and men's magazines suggests that the language of these articles actually functions to create an anxiety that can only be mollified through purchase of the magazine and/or the products it advertises. In a postmodern society, however, the women's magazine remains, for much of its readership, one of the few sites of ongoing engagement with culture through writing. Writing assignments based on ideological analyses of print culture can serve to awaken the critical skills of a wide range of students while concurrently developing the analytical abilities essential in a competent writer and citizen. (NKA)