Catherine Clay - Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939

W OMEN S P ERIODICALS AND
P RINT C ULTURE IN B RITAIN ,
19181939

The Edinburgh History of Womens Periodical Culture in Britain

Series Editor: Jackie Jones

Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 16901820s: The Long Eighteenth Century

Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell

Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s1900s: The Victorian Period

Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s1920s: The Modernist Period

Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 19181939: The Interwar Period

Edited by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney

Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s2000s: The Contemporary Period

Visit The Edinburgh History of Womens Periodical Culture in Britain web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ehwpcb

T HE E DINBURGH H ISTORY OF W OMEN S
P ERIODICAL C ULTURE IN B RITAIN

W OMEN S P ERIODICALS AND
P RINT C ULTURE IN B RITAIN ,
19181939

The Interwar Period

E DITED BY C ATHERINE C LAY , M ARIA D I C ENZO ,
B ARBARA G REEN , AND F IONA H ACKNEY

EDINBURGH

University Press

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

editorial matter and organisation Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo,
Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney, 2018

the chapters their several authors, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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ISBN 978 1 4744 1253 7 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 1254 4 (webready PDF)

ISBN 978 1 4744 1255 1 (epub)

The right of Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

C ONTENTS

L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T his volume grew out of a conversation with our commissioning editor Jackie Jones at a Modernist Studies Association conference where we discussed the relative invisibility of womens periodicals in an expanding field of modern periodicals research still largely dominated by modernism and little magazines. We would like to thank Jackie for her vision and enthusiasm for this project from the outset, and everyone else at Edinburgh University Press who has helped bring it to completion, especially Adela Rauchova for her efficiency and patience in the final stages, and James Dale for being so receptive to our style suggestions. We are delighted that this volume launches a multi-volume series from the Edinburgh University Press devoted to womens periodical culture.

There are many people behind the scenes who have contributed to the development of this volume. We would like to thank the reviewers who offered guidance at the proposal stage, and we are very grateful to all the anonymous readers who reviewed the chapters published here for their time and valuable comments. We would like to thank our contributors for all of their hard work and for making this project such a positive collaborative experience. Barbara Green would particularly like to thank Carey Snyder, co-editor of a forthcoming volume in this series devoted to modernist womens periodical writing, for fruitful brainstorming sessions at the Modernist Studies Association and online.

The editors would like to thank family and friends who have patiently encouraged us. In particular, Fiona Hackney would also like to thank Julia Bigham for her support. Gratitude, as always, from Maria DiCenzo to Graham Knight who was so generous with his time and support. Special thanks to Heather Olaveson for her eagle eye and painstaking editorial work. The editors would also like to thank Susan Hroncek for her work on the appendix and her technical assistance in the final stages.

Maria DiCenzo would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous support. Barbara Green would like to thank the Department of English and the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame for generous support for this project. She would also like to thank Denise Massa, Curator, Visual Resources Center at the Hesburgh Libraries, the University of Notre Dame, and Amy Wood of the Center for Research Libraries for their generous assistance.

Contributors to this volume gratefully acknowledge permission to use illustrations and thank the following groups: the British Library Board; the Bodleian Libraries; Cond Nast Publications, Ltd; the Co-operative Heritage Trust; the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter; Glaxo Smith Kline; the Nursery World; Trinity Mirror Publishing Limited; and Time Inc. UK.

G ENERAL I NTRODUCTION : R E -M EDIATING
W OMEN AND THE I NTERWAR P ERIOD

Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green,
and Fiona Hackney

In spite of all the parade that the commercial Press makes of its womens pages and its womens 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 wants. It is what it gets, and that is another thing altogether. (Womans Leader 7 Jan 1921: 1037)

I N 1989 , D EIRDRE Beddoes Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars, 19181939 argued for the central role media played in the construction of a dominant set of gender expectations. Research of the last two decades has significantly challenged Beddoes claim that interwar mainstream media forms offered only one desirable image of femininity, that of the housewife and mother (1989: 8). In his study of the popular interwar press, Adrian Bingham (2004) has shown that the multiple voices of any one newspaper presented a variety of new images of women to the public, contributing to an evolving discourse of gender. Often overlooked is how popular media aimed at female readers could also resist and oppose mainstream views. Moreover, as the epigraph from the Womans Leader demonstrates, feminist periodicals intervened and offered critical perspectives on the influence and changing face of the press at the time, and provided information and forums not available elsewhere. For these reasons, we share Beddoes crucial insight that the magazines marketed to women during the interwar period whether avant-garde or mainstream, up- or down-market deserve special attention. This volume reveals the startling complexity of periodicals aimed at women readers and the various notions of the modern woman they suggested. Collectively, the essays in this volume reveal the richness and diversity of genres addressed to women readers, from domestic magazines, pulps, and womens pages to highbrow reviews, feminist, and organisationally based periodicals. The goal is to open up the category of the womens magazine beyond the assumptions and expectations through which it is conventionally understood and to demonstrate the central role of womens print media in reshaping public discourses of gender by defining womens interests, activities, and identities in the period.