Shufu no Tomo 主婦乃友 (1917-2008)                    

Shufu no Tomo, targeting middle class women, designed their magazines that suits the scholastic ability of women who had finished their elementary level education, covering useful information for daily life of housewives.

Shufu no Tomo lied in a bipolar position in terms of their portrayal of ideal female figure. On the one hand, their articles generally seemed to have adopted a value towards familialism, and admiration for women's self-sacrifice for their households. This ideology derives from the fact that 59.7%, more than half of the readers were composed of housewives. It is inevitable that, the magazine consciously dispatches information that suits the preference of the housewives, and expressing support towards their targeted readers, who obediently follows the "good wife wise mother 良妻賢母" value in their everyday life.

On the other hand, they also showed consistent support for improvement of gender equality in households, working women, and educating readers to maintain their sexual morality as well. Such value was supported with the precondition that the women are suffering through unfortunate circumstances (absence of male family members due to illness, or death) which impose them to take on the role as the breadwinner through outside labor 職業婦人. Even in such cases, the magazine pushed an Confucian idea of self-sacrifice, to motivate them to be engaged in their new role as working women.