About Pesona

Pesona

Pesona is an Indonesian women's magazine published in Jakarta by the Femina Group, created in 2002 for women of mature age — readers of 35 years and above. Its name means "charm" or "enchantment". Where the group's flagship, Femina, served Indonesian women generally, Pesona was founded because women who had moved into mature adulthood found their needs no longer met by Femina alone; it addresses the problems, choices and pleasures specific to women who are no longer young. Since 2015 it has carried the tagline "Life, Inspiration, Passion", expressing the character of the mature woman it portrays: established, no longer searching for identity, and shown in its pages as fresh, bright, happy, confident and beautiful. Scholarly analysis of the magazine, published in the journal Patanjala in 2018, examined how Pesona represented mature women in its articles between 2010 and 2016.

The Femina Group and why Pesona was created

Pesona belongs to the Femina Group, the Jakarta publishing house founded around PT Gaya Favorit Press — later PT Prana Dinamika Sejahtera — whose first magazine, Femina, appeared in September 1972 as Indonesia's first women's magazine of the modern era. Femina's founders included Pia and Sofyan Alisjahbana and Mirta Kartohadiprodjo, who edited it from 1972 to 1982; its first issue ran to 44 pages with a circulation of 20,000 copies, and it grew from a monthly into a biweekly in 1973 and a weekly from the early 1980s. Around that flagship the group built a family of magazines for successive stages of women's lives — Gadis for teenage girls, Ayahbunda for parents, Dewi for fashion-conscious readers, and others — fourteen magazines in total at the group's height, alongside radio stations, online publishing, books and events. The Patanjala study explains Pesona's place in that family precisely: Femina represented urban, well-informed, middle-class women with an open outlook, but when women advanced into mature age, from 35 upward, many of their needs were no longer accommodated by Femina — so Pesona arrived in 2002.

The mature-women segment

The reasoning behind Pesona, as the scholarly record sets it out, was demographic and cultural. Life expectancy was lengthening and retirement ages rising, so that the years once simply called old age had become a long, active stage of life worth addressing in its own right; the 2000s were described as the decade of women in Indonesia, with women prominent in many sectors and women writers emerging with varied themes and open expression of thoughts once considered taboo. A woman of fifty in this Indonesia was not finished; she was experienced, often at the height of her earning and deciding power, and facing distinctive questions about health, family, work, money, appearance and meaning. Pesona set out to hold a mirror to those women and to raise their confidence — to show that a mature woman could remain beautiful, self-assured, meaningful and happy, and could make the important decisions for her own happiness. The study notes that the women Pesona portrayed were urban, educated and middle class, matching the Femina Group's established readership.

Tagline: Life, Inspiration, Passion

In 2015 Pesona adopted the tagline "Life, Inspiration, Passion", which the Patanjala analysis treats as the magazine's identity statement for established women. The study found the motto worked through in its articles. "Life" was represented by articles persuading readers to fill, enjoy and make their lives more meaningful. "Inspiration" appeared in contents of many kinds, from fashion to food, that gave readers ideas. "Passion" was manifested in articles about successes achieved through consistency and the pursuit of a chosen passion. The analysis organised the magazine's representation of maturity into themes: maturity in determining one's choices; emotional maturity; the independent woman; the successful woman; the woman as inspiration; and the distinctive problems of maturity. That framework — choice, emotion, independence, success, inspiration, problems — is a fair summary of the editorial ground a magazine for women over 35 must cover, and it distinguishes Pesona from youth-oriented titles in the same group such as Gadis or Cita Cinta.

Content and readership

As a Femina Group women's magazine, Pesona covered the standard territories of Indonesian women's publishing — fashion and beauty, culinary and living, self-improvement, career and personal finance, health and fitness, relationships and family — but re-angled for its segment. The group's magazines shared a philosophy, stated for Femina from its founding, of helping Indonesian women optimise their potential without losing their identity as women, and of improving life from self-development through household and family to concern for society and nation. For Pesona's readers, that philosophy translated into attention to the mature stage itself: changing bodies and health, adult children and ageing parents, second careers and businesses, financial decisions for retirement, and the emotional work of a life stage that Indonesian media had largely ignored in favour of youth. The Patanjala researcher, writing as a reader of the magazine, described Pesona as attempting to give another view of the image of mature women — women displayed not as faded versions of the young but as fresh, bright and confident in their own right.

Pesona in academic discussion

Pesona has a documented place in Indonesian media scholarship. The 2018 Patanjala article, "Representation of Mature Women in Pesona Magazine (Femina Group) Indonesia", analysed its articles from 2010 to 2016 and concluded that the magazine consistently projected its Life, Inspiration, Passion identity through representations of mature decision-making, emotional maturity, independence, success and inspiration, alongside honest treatment of maturity's problems. The existence of such a study matters for the magazine's record: among the Femina Group's many titles, Pesona is one of those singled out for scholarly attention, precisely because its editorial project — redefining how Indonesian media pictures women over 35 — raised questions that interested cultural researchers. The study also preserves basic facts of the magazine's identity that might otherwise be lost: its founding in 2002, its segment of women aged 35 and above, and its 2015 tagline.

The Femina Group in transition

Pesona's lifetime spans the Femina Group's transformation from a print empire into a smaller, digital-age company. At its height the group published fourteen magazines; Indonesian closure records for 2015 to 2019 list several Femina Group titles among the magazines that ended in that period, including Cita Cinta, Grazia Indonesia, Cleo Indonesia and Reader's Digest Indonesia in 2016. Femina itself moved from weekly to monthly publication in 2018 and ended its print edition in early 2023, continuing online. Pesona's story is part of that arc: a segment magazine created in 2002, when print segmentation was still expanding and a publisher could profitably divide women's lives into titles by age and interest, and sustained into the years when those same economics contracted. Its survival strategy, like its sister titles', lay in the group's brand trust, built since 1972, and in communities of loyal readers.

Women's magazines and the life course in Indonesia

Pesona's founding completed a life-course ladder inside Indonesian women's publishing. The Femina Group could, in principle, accompany a reader from Gadis in her teens, through Femina in her twenties and thirties, Ayahbunda in her parenting years and Pesona in her maturity — a publishing idea that treated women's lives as a sequence of distinct readerships. Pesona's specific contribution was to insist, in 2002, that maturity was a market and a subject: that women over 35 in Indonesia had problems, ambitions and pleasures that deserved their own magazine, edited for them rather than borrowed from titles aimed at their daughters. The academic verdict on its pages — that it portrayed mature women as choosers, feelers, independents, achievers and inspirations — suggests the insistence was carried into practice.

Pesona in the record

The verifiable record of Pesona is held together by its publisher's history and by the scholarly literature: a Jakarta women's magazine of the Femina Group (PT Gaya Favorit Press), launched in 2002 for women aged 35 and above, adopting the tagline "Life, Inspiration, Passion" in 2015, and analysed in a peer-reviewed cultural journal for its representation of mature women between 2010 and 2016. In a directory of Indonesian magazines it represents a category easily overlooked — the mature women's magazine — and a publisher, the Femina Group, that shaped Indonesian women's reading for half a century. Pesona's name promised charm; its editorial project, as the research describes it, was to prove that charm, confidence and ambition in Indonesian women did not expire at thirty-five.