Wright Enright was born Margaret Ellen Wright in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the third child of William and Anna Wright. The name "Maginel" was a later creation of her mother's, a contraction of "Maggie Nell". At age two the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Ten years later they moved to Chicago, to be closer to Frank's architectural work, where she eventually attended the Chicago Art Institute. Her first job as a commercial artist was with the Barnes, Crosby Co. of Chicago, where her main task was catalog illustration. There she met Walter J. "Pat" Enright, another young artist, whom she married.

Wright Enright gave birth to her daughter Elizabeth on September 17, 1907, in Oak Park, Illinois.  The Enrights moved to New York City for their careers and enjoyed an active social life there. After their divorce, Wright Enright married Hiram Barney, a lawyer who died in 1925.  Wright Enright's autobiography, The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses, was published in 1965, one year before her death in East Hampton, New York.

It was under the name of Maginel Wright Enright that she conducted her professional career. She illustrated 63 children's books during her lifetime, sometimes working alone and sometimes with other artists. Her first job as a book illustrator was on The Twinkle Tales, a set of six booklets for young children published by Reilly & Britton in 1906, and written by L. Frank Baum under the pseudonym "Laura Bancroft." The books were successful, selling 40,000 copies the first year. Wright Enright also illustrated Baum's Policeman Bluejay (1907) and L. Frank Baum's Juvenile Speaker (1910, with John R. Neill). (Her husband also worked on the Baum canon: Walter Enright illustrated Baum's Father Goose's Year Book in 1907.) She illustrated the book Flower Fairies, an alternate version of this title, written by Clara Ingram Judson, in 1915.

She also illustrated editions of Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1921) and Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates (with Edna Cooke, 1918). She was acclaimed as one of "the very best artists" for children.

She wrote and illustrated The Baby's Record Through the First Year in Song and Story (1928), and compiled and illustrated Weather Signs and Rhymes (1931). She also illustrated textbooks for children, mainly readers for younger children. Her daughter Elizabeth Enright credits Wright Enright with "the revolutionizing of textbook illustration" with lively, graceful, and imaginative pictures that appealed to young readers.

In addition to book illustration, Wright Enright was a magazine illustrator and cover artist, working mostly for women's magazines like McClure's and the Ladies' Home Journal. She also designed Christmas cards and did various and miscellaneous sorts of artwork. In the memoir Tales of Taliesin, Cornelia Brierley recalls Maginel, "full of fun and very sophisticated", spending summers with her daughter Elizabeth ("Bitsy") at her brother's establishment Taliesin, designing and making "yarn paintings" that she later sold in New York. In the 1940s, she distinguished herself as a shoe designer, creating high-fashion jeweled and sequined shoes, which were manufactured by Capezio.

The magazine was launched in the United States in 1981 by a European magazine publisher, Heinrich Bauer Verlag of Hamburg, Germany, which set up an American subsidiary, Heinrich Bauer North America in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Woman's World was the company's first American release, and was aimed at a target audience of middle-class mothers. The magazine gained rapid popularity, and within ten years had a circulation of 1.5 million readers, generating US$15 million in annual revenue.

A different magazine with the same name, but with no connection to the current one, was published in the United States 1884–1940. It has no connection to a local television series of the same name aired on WKRG-TV in Mobile, Alabama.

The magazine is published in a large tabloid newspaper format, with about 60 pages per issue, and approximately 12% of the magazine devoted to advertisements. The cover generally features several headlines for internal articles, along with a cover model who is generally a regular woman rather than an actress or model, who has accomplished something such as a popular or winning recipe, written an article about a health story or exercise regimen for the magazine, or detailed their successful weight loss regimen. Celebrities (generally in niche fields such as soap operas or cable channel drama series on niche networks rather than higher-profile actresses) are also featured occasionally. The magazine generally does not publish gossip features.