Beauty, fashion, food, health and love: is that all women really want?

Something lovely for the ladies: that's the pitch of the new Sarah Sands 'Sunday Telegraph'. The 'Grazia'-fication of Fleet Street is now upon us. By Jane Thynne

Any Martian picking up one of our national papers might be forgiven for thinking that this is the state of play in the gender wars. There is an indefinable girliness in the air, a focus on domesticity as never before.

Sarah Sands, the editor of The Sunday Telegraph launches her new magazine today. The first edition of Stella opens with 25 pages of fashion and beauty. These are followed by a horoscope, a feature on a stalker boy-friend and others called Princess Charming, Sex and the Pretty and How Old Are You Really? She is keen to emphasise the "incredibly pretty design" of the section, which is unarguably a central plank in her plan to feminise the newspaper.

Discussing how she would balance the budget of the radical redesign - largely aimed at connecting with a floating constituency of female readers - Sands referred to herself as "a housewife at heart".

But why? She's nothing like a housewife. She's a deeply talented career journalist who has got to the top through long hours and hard graft. The question is not just why Sands should be anxious to advertise herself in that way - after all, Margaret Thatcher was another famous housewife manquée - but why this very domestic image of femininity should be invoked right now in Fleet Street's endless quest for female readers.

Why not woo women with harder-hitting news exclusives, or deeper analysis of the pensions crisis? Thrill them with the prospect of more foreign affairs or business content? Instead, it appears that shopping, consuming, celebrity and health are the key weapons in the battle for Britain's domestic goddesses.

Sands is not alone in embracing her inner Nigella. Coming out of the domestic closet last week was Lucy Cavendish, the Evening Standard columnist, who announced that staying at home was the new feminism. Giving up the office is "breaking the last taboo", she wrote. "It's no fun being a woman holding down a full-time job and also trying to run a house, children and a marriage," she told readers of The Independent and subsequently of the Daily Mail, which eagerly recycled the piece.

"You are noticeably getting a much higher level of domestic copy in all papers except perhaps The Guardian, and that's good," says Rosie Boycott, who, as a former national newspaper editor herself, wrestled with the enduring problem of female readers. "Women know that the everyday is extremely important - what you're buying and feeding your kids.

"We've relocated our centre of gravity since the 1980s, when it was a no-go area for a successful woman to admit you like that kind of stuff, and we were all enslaved by that vile Superwoman thing.

"It's like we said when we founded Spare Rib - the personal is political," she adds. "It's not that women aren't interested in international politics, but they're disenchanted by it and realise there's more you can do in your own life."

However, journalist Tracey MacLeod deplores the presumptions behind what women want: "I instinctively do a body swerve away from papers that seem skewed to a female agenda. I want to read a mixed offering; I don't want this idea that someone is producing a special supplement for ladies."

"Women readers" have long been talked of in Fleet Street with a mixture of yearning and denigration. Anyone who has worked in newspapers in the past two decades can recall meetings full of men in suits agonising about attracting women.

Setting aside the fact that women form the majority of the British population, they are seen as a quixotic constituency, elusive. But, because of their spending habits - the prime choosers of food, clothes and holidays - they are disproportionately desirable to advertisers.

"I think men get geared to their newspapers, partly because of their professions - like lawyers reading The Times - and partly because they get fixated on particular sports writers," says Boycott. "I don't think anyone provides that same lock-in for women, which is why they're more capricious."

With declining circulations all round, many radical recent moves have been made with women readers in mind. The Times relaunched its second section in September as T2, with an overwhelming emphasis on female readers and an advertising campaign specifically targeting women. The Guardian's relaunch, too, is perceived as a feminine move - one eminent American media commentator described the new Berliner to me as "the girls' Guardian" - and focus groups have repeatedly found that the tabloid shape appeals more to female readers.

However, according to the journalist Amanda Platell, the renewed focus on the feminine is just a sign of newspapers smartening up their act.

"While Sarah Sands is trying to feminise The Sunday Telegraph, which is seen as a masculine product, The Mail On Sunday's Night And Day is being turned into a bloke mag," Platell explains.

"People are just trying to serve men and women better and the truth is that women do buy Heat and Hello! and Closer. It's not polarising the genders; it's just serving their interests. I'm deeply interested in international politics but I'll still sit down and read a good glossy."

But do women mind being targeted with items on shopping and consuming and celebrity and health? Do they feel flattered or patronised? Not, it seems, if it's coming from women themselves.

"It's a mark of confidence," says Boycott. "It's coming of age and not giving a fuck."

In marked contrast to the days when one tabloid editor used to refer to himself as "chief tampon" because he worked surrounded by female colleagues, everyone on Fleet Street is now accustomed to working alongside, if not under, women journalists.

Female editors abound. As well as Rebekah Wade at The Sun, Veronica Wadley at the Evening Standard and Tina Weaver at the Sunday Mirror, there are deputy editors Georgina Henry at The Guardian and Chrystia Freeland at the Financial Times.

The conundrum is that a female editor does not, except in the case of the Sunday Mirror - where 54 per cent of readers are now women - mean more female readers.

Under Rebekah Wade, The Sun has lost 7 per cent of its women readers, and the female readership at the Evening Standard under Veronica Wadley is thought to have slipped further from 45 per cent.

Perversely, it is Paul Dacre's Daily Mail, which takes a famously contradictory approach to women, that still has proportionately more women readers than any other paper.

But that is something of which Sarah Sands, an Associated Newspapers alumna, is only too well aware.