By women for women

 "She had on a powder-blue jersey shirt and brown jersey slacks."

This is a sentence taken from Frances Crane's novel, The Golden Box, published in 1942. 

It is interesting to me when writers reveal bald-facedly that they are willingly sacrificing half their market. This story is a murder mystery, and IF the sentence above had imbedded within it some sort of clue that would lead us down the path of discovering who done it, then I (speaking as a male) could see some purpose to it. But you will have to take my word for it that it does not. It is like the descriptions of wedding gowns that used to be published in the newspapers. Did any man EVER read those? Highly unlikely. Nor do any men who might read this novel care what Peg was wearing as she came into the room carrying a glass of orange juice. There is nothing wrong with it, it is just not something that would interest the typical male reader.

So, since this is a mystery, and we are murder mystery fans, what do we deduce from the sentence at the top of this page? It tells us that this was a story written by a woman for women. It is actually a fairly good yarn and the detective who solves the mystery is a man. But the person telling the story is a woman, and she tells us things that could only interest a woman. So, either the author was pointing this story strictly at a female market, or she was woefully ignorant of the differences between the sexes, which I doubt. OR she was making the teller of the tail realistic by having her focus on things that would interest a woman, which I suspect is the truth.

The parallel on the male side of the equation would be a Louis L'Amour novel in which the hero shoots three bad guys on the first page. He is not writing that book for women. Oh, sure, a good many women may read it, but he reveals his market by how he writes the book.