A Periodical of Their Own: Feminist Writing in Religious Print Media

In this volume’s rich survey of women’s print media in the interwar period, it might be surprising to find a chapter on feminist writing in religious periodicals – that is, if one assumes that Britain’s religious traditions were inhospitable contexts for feminist organising during this time period. But that assumption would not be entirely correct. The Anglican, Catholic, and Jewish communities in Britain – the three traditions explored here – certainly clung to theological and institutional structures that prevented women from moving freely or quickly into leadership roles. But these communities were never homogenous and their members expressed a wide range of attitudes about gender, sexuality, and women’s roles, some of which were highly progressive and found their way into print. The changing social and gender norms of the interwar period were much debated topics in Britain’s religious communities, and through their engagement with religious media, women found ways to influence those debates.

Labour Woman and the Housewife

The chapter discusses how Labour Party women engaged with the newly-enfranchised housewife between the wars. It focuses on how Labour Woman represented the working-class housewife and the degree to which it enabled her to speak for herself. It chose everyday domestic life, traditionally assumed to be beyond politics, as the way to connect with unorganised women in their homes. In its Housewife Column the relevance of politics to women’s daily lives was explored through domestic topics such food prices, housework, washing and making clothes. Even with the increasing dominance of recipes and dress patterns in the 1930s, the journal continued to see the housewife as having agency and a distinct experience shaped by class. For Labour Woman interwar domesticity was neither cosy nor rationalised and modern, it was a space which provided the means to engage with the everyday lives of ordinary women.

‘The Magazine Short Story and the Real Short Story’: Consuming Fiction in the Feminist Weekly Time and Tide

This chapter examines the short fiction content of the feminist weekly Time and Tide alongside readers’ letters printed in the periodical’s correspondence columns. A basic unit of magazine production the short story is also ‘definitional to modernism’ (Armstrong 2005: 52), and during the interwar period its status as commodity or art became the subject of increasing scrutiny and debate. Drawing on examples from amateur writers and well-known figures such as E. M. Delafield, the chapter explores how Time and Tide negotiated readers’ expectations for short fiction amongst its core target audience of women readers. Building on Fionnuala Dillane’s application of affect theory to periodical studies (2016), the chapter uses her concept of ‘discursive disruption’ to consider moments of conflict between Time and Tide and its readers over the short stories it published as moments of opportunity for the periodical to expand its scope, readership and brow, and renegotiate its position in the literary marketplace.

Sketching Out America’s Jazz Age in British Vogue

This chapter investigates the contributions to modernism of Dorothy Todd’s British Vogue (1922-1926) as the magazine traced the evolution of Bloomsbury in England and the Jazz Age in America. While scholarship on this periodical has traditionally focused on the publication of Bloomsbury artists in the magazine, this chapter examines Todd’s displacement of the high/popular cultural binary through her unflagging support of jazz music and avant-garde literature. Furthermore, in examining Anne Harriet Fish’s and Miguel Covarrubias’s cartoons and illustrations, the chapter reveals the era’s use of visual humour as a means of coping with deeper anxieties regarding women’s increasing independence and the emergence of African-American culture as a fixture in mainstream, American culture. Analysing the construction of the Modern Woman and the New Negro in a commercial magazine demonstrates readers’ initial introduction to Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance, broadening our understanding of modernism’s function in commercial settings.

General Introduction: Re-mediating Women and the Interwar Period

In spite of all the parade that the commercial Press makes of its women’s pages and its women’s supplements, the real substance of what we need is still deplorably absent. They give us fashions in abundance and superabundance, they record society doings which are of little or no interest, they repeat recipes until we are surfeited … and fancy that by doing so they produce the mental food that women need … But they fail to convince us, all the same, that such monotonous and substanceless rubbish is what the female public really ...

Woman Appeal. A New Rhetoric of Consumption: Women’s Domestic Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

The launch of over fifty titles put women and their magazines at the forefront of popular publishing in the interwar years. The buoyant market opened new opportunities for women as writers, on the editorial side, in publicity, art departments, and related areas such as advertising, in order to better ‘appeal to women’ and articulate the ‘woman’s point of view’. Driven by commercial imperatives–women were considered to hold the purse strings of the nation–woman appeal, nevertheless, signalled a more nuanced understanding of female psychology and a gendered perspective on life. This chapter examines how it was constructed in the domestic monthly Modern Woman in the 1920s, and popular weeklies Woman’s Weekly and Woman in the 1930s. It argues that while simultaneously serving to reinforce accepted notions of womanhood, the complex relationship between editorial and advertising produced a hybrid environment in magazines that offered their widening readerships a space to imagine other versions of womanhood which, albeit quietly, challenged established class and gender norms.

‘The Sheep and the Goats’: Interwar Women Journalists, the Society of Women Journalists, and the Woman Journalist

By the outbreak of the Second World War, women made up approximately 20 per cent of journalists in Britain, doubling their participation in mainstream journalism since the turn of the twentieth century. They were mostly employed by women’s magazines, were precariously freelance or confined to the newspaper ‘women’s page’, and faced resistance from the powerful National Union of Journalists, which imposed limitations on women’s access to newspaper newsrooms. Women journalists had emerged from the First World War with prominent bylines on popular newspaper leader pages; however, many women struggled to maintain their elevated status through the interwar years and either retreated into, or were pushed back into, the women’s sections. Using content from the Woman Journalist, newspaper and magazine articles, and memoirs, this chapter will examine the role, status, and professional associations of interwar women journalists to piece together their lives and attitudes to work. There is no doubt that, as members of a subjugated group, women journalists faced many struggles, but this chapter will ask whether these struggles were outweighed by the opportunities for adventure and financial independence that journalism offered them. It will also examine whether female journalists’ contributions to interwar newspapers and magazines reinforced media messages limiting women’s lives to ‘hearth and home’, thus contributing to women’s ‘symbolic annihilation’ from the public sphere.1 It will also ask whether the professional organisation, the Society of Women Journalists (SWJ), and its organ, the Woman Journalist, helped women journalists challenge gender barriers or encouraged gender stereotyping in their work.

Housekeeping, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Good Housekeeping and Modern Home

This chapter interrogates the framing of women as citizens through domestic work in two interwar service magazines: Modern Home and Good Housekeeping. It examines their treatment of housekeeping as a skilled occupation, contrasting Modern Home’s portrayal of homemaking as woman’s chief role and service to the nation with Good Housekeeping’s insistence on women’s citizenship within and outside the home. It argues that while both magazines presented nostalgic views of England and Englishness in keeping with a broader middle-class turn towards family and nation in the interwar period, Good Housekeeping also urged its readers to consider their role and responsibilities as homemaker citizens in international terms. This chapter demonstrates the danger of homogenising accounts of interwar service magazines and counters the belief that the home represented a straightforward retreat from society and politics at this time.

‘Dear Cinema Girls’: Girlhood, Picture-going, and the Interwar Film Magazine

This chapter explores the role of the interwar British fan magazine in mediating ideas about modern British girlhood. Film periodicals invited readers into a complex and unstable network of film-inflected girlhoods in a period during which youthful femininity was defined more closely in relation to class and marital status than age, and in which representations of unmarried working girls and young wives had complex roles to play in defining national culture. The chapter suggests that reading the interwar film magazine is a distinct new way to re-read the narrative of ‘home and duty’, complicating a domestic ideal by offsetting more glamorous images and alternative possibilities of modern femininity against more conservative discourses on female identity. It argues that print cultures of film affected ideas about girlhood, class, and mass culture in this way, allowing their readers to simultaneously assign, test out, and in some ways re-write girls’ culturally ascribed domestic roles.

‘The Lady Interviewer and her methods’: Chatter, Celebrity, and Reading Communities

This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping figure. Yet she also had her real-life counterparts: women who used this stereotype to break into the print and broadcast media industries in increasing numbers, and who in turn supported the expansion of print media oriented towards women’s professional and social interests. Increasingly close associations between female journalists and Hollywood fan magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, would however, see a decline in the reputation of both the Lady Interviewer and her female readers. This chapter explores the constructions of specific reading communities forged through interviewing in popular media.