‘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.

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.

Woman’s Outlook 1919–39: An Educational Space for Co-operative Women

WOMAN’S OUTLOOK was first published in 1919 as a magazine for the women of the co-operative movement. Despite extensive scholarship on the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG), both within the organisation and in relation to the British women’s movement, this publication has received only limited attention. This chapter examines Woman’s Outlook as part of the interwar co-operative women’s movement, arguing that it functioned at a variety of levels to bring women together into a co-operative community. Woman’s Outlook represented a group of women who were not captured in other publications, and who shared particular concerns as working class women committed to co-operative ideas and trading. While it promoted the co-operative movement more widely, within the movement it served as a means of sharing information with and from its readers on effective home management (thereby responding to women’s immediate lives and needs) and aimed to extend women’s interests beyond the home. In these ways, it proved both educational and aspirational, expanding women’s horizons at a time when opportunities for women were changing, by showing what other women had and could achieve. The most sustained analysis of Woman’s Outlook to date is Rachel Ritchie’s study of Woman’s Outlook and Home and Country, the magazine produced by the Women’s Institute (WI). While Ritchie focuses on the 1950s, the goal here is to revisit Woman’s Outlook and its place in informing and educating a community of co-operative women from its inception in the interwar years.

Women’s Organisations and Communities of Interest: Introduction

THE INTERWAR PERIOD saw the proliferation of women’s organisations – voluntary, popular, non-political, party- and faith-based – some of which engaged with feminist discourses and others that deliberately avoided these associations, defining and generating a new array of women-defined collective identities.1 The work of feminist historians in recent decades has been instrumental in redefining the parameters of the women’s movement to include the efforts of non-feminist organisations as advocates for women’s rights. Maggie Andrews captures this tendency in the phrase ‘the acceptable face of feminism’ in her groundbreaking study of the Women’s Institute as a social movement, challenging the ‘jam and Jerusalem’ image so often attributed to these forms of women’s associational culture (1997). Recently Karen Hunt and June Hannam have argued for ‘a new archeology of “women’s politics”’ as a way to reframe and arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the participation and role of women in various areas of public life (2013). While many of the periodicals showcased in this section were not overtly feminist, they certainly engaged in women’s politics and forms of advocacy in this broader sense, and they did so across the political spectrum. It is important to recognise why it might have been more appealing and even more practical for organisations to distance themselves from feminism, particularly in a climate of hostile reaction. As DiCenzo and Eustance note in the previous Part, the ‘demise’ school of interwar history has not always fully recognised the adversarial conditions women faced and the resistance with which their demands were met....

Ireland and Sapphic Journalism between the Wars: A Case Study of Urania (1916–40)

This chapter examines the Irish dimension of the bi-monthly (later tri-annual) periodical Urania (1916-1940) through a focus on the influence of Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926). Gore-Booth’s editorial vision and writing for Urania conveyed a radical message about gender and sexuality: ‘sex is an accident.’ On its pages, Urania assiduously collected a hidden history of lesbians, transsexuals, and intersexuality and advanced a transnational, cross-cultural critique of gender norms, gendered performances, and compulsory heterosexuality. Urania initially sought to broaden its appeal by supporting votes for women, but remained more intent on serving as a ‘queer archive’ dedicated to dismantling gender norms and documenting women’s past and present examples of transsexuality, intersexuality, cross-dressing, and lesbianism. In its remediation of the global press, Urania also constructed a composite, feminist portrait of a society free of gender essentialism and heterosexual normativity. The journal was affiliated with the Aëthnic Union, a small, radical organisation founded in 1911.