Since 1939, the magazine Glamour has published content largely geared toward a female audience.
Over the years, its subject matter and readership have changed with the times.
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Glamour has always been a champion of style and the external self. It also has said it emphasized individuality and intelligence.
"These days our editors are less into fashion rules and more into fashion rebels — and street style, and experimenting, and all the other freedoms our white-gloved predecessors didn't have," wrote Cindi Leive, the magazine's former editor-in-chief, in 2014. "But there has been a consistent theme running through Glamour's seven-plus decades: that real style is a combination of good clothes and great attitude — and that you don't need to be a movie star or an heiress to get either."
With a significant presence in both print and digital media, former CNN and BBC journalist Samantha Barry took over as editor-in-chief in 2018 and oversaw its transition away from print, with the last print issue in January 2019.
Barry has a history of writing and saying a lot about the evolving topic of women and finances.
Barry talks about women and money
She recently stopped by the New York Stock Exchange to talk with TheStreet's J.D. Durkin (the video is above).
"You've spoken a lot over the course of your career about the importance of financial literacy," Durkin said. "What have those conversations, those fights looked like for you and why has that been so important? Not just to you personally, but really in terms of, I think, the messaging and the things that you try and communicate given your platform."
Barry first explained a bit about her background in journalism.
"So when I took the helm at Glamour, it was 2018, I had previously always worked in news," she said. "I worked at CNN. I worked at BBC in London and I started in radio in Ireland — RTE — and this was my first time going into this world of publishing and it was probably more thematic than I had been used to."
Barry's first issue at Glamour featured a money-focused theme, she said.
"And that for me was really important, because as I walked in the door of Glamour, I was like, I really want to have this conversation with women around money," she said. "It was for me carrying on this legacy that Glamour had always done, which is talk to women about money."
In the 1950s and 1960s, Barry explained, the magazine's articles about money were focused on topics important at the time, such as how to get a credit card without the permission of your husband.
"Now it's evolved thankfully. It's talking to female entrepreneurs," Barry said. "We have a big growing commerce part of our business."
Barry said one type of subject matter the magazine focuses on now educates its readers on businesses it believes its audience would like to support.
"And one of the key moments for us is we ask our audience to use their spending power around women-led and women-owned businesses," she said. "And we do that through 'By Women,' where we are always across style and beauty and wellness. We are telling them exactly which companies are owned by women and where they should put their money."
"And so that's for us, again, a new conversation with women around money," she added.
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Barry's advice for her younger self, including her F-word
The Glamour editor-in-chief discussed something she's addressed before: that she has learned some things she wishes she could tell her 20-year-old self:
I talk a lot about the concept of a fallback fund, which is like the table stakes for women. I actually use a different F-word when I'm talking about it. But it's a fallback fund, which is this concept of wherever you are, no matter how much money you're earning, the table stakes of what you should have is three months, three to six months of living."
So you can leave a bad lease, a bad job, a bad marriage and you have that financial security. And what we do know is a lot of people in the U.S. and a lot of women don't even have those basics.
A lot of women are living month to month and I think maybe spending in ways that in their twenties that they would regret in their thirties. So that's kind of the conversation that we have.
I'm not American. So when I arrived in the U.S. I was credit invisible. Millions of people in America are credit invisible. It is a hard system to change but it not insurmountable.
So we talk to women about how going from credit zero to improving your credit rating. And again, these are little parts that can change your financial future.
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