Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period

Description

This collection of new essays recovers and explores a neglected archive of women's print media and dispels the myth of the interwar decades as a retreat to 'home and duty' for women. The volume demonstrates that women produced magazines and periodicals ranging in forms and appeal from highbrow to popular, private circulation to mass-market, and radical to reactionary. It shows that the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to a plurality of new challenges and opportunities for women as consumers, workers and citizens, as well as wives and mothers. Featuring interdisciplinary research by recognised specialists in the fields of literary and periodical studies as well as women's and cultural history, this volume recovers overlooked or marginalised media and archival sources, as well as reassessing well-known commercial titles. Designed as a 'go-to' resource both for readers new to the field and for specialists seeking the latest developments in this area of research, it opens up new directions and methodologies for modern periodical studies and cultural history. Organised by sections devoted to the arts, modern style, domestic and service magazines, and feminist and organizationally-based media, this volume foregrounds connections between different genres of women's periodical publishing and makes a major contribution to revisionist scholarship on the interwar period. The detailed appendix provides a valuable resource to facilitate new research on interwar women's magazines. Review '"Plurality of voices" aptly describes Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939, because the chapters in this fourth title of a five-volume set examine the notion of modern women as more than merely domestic' --K. Lynass, CHOICE Connect About the Author Catherine Clay is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Time and Tide: the Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (EUP, forthcoming) and has published widely on British interwar women's writing and journalism. Maria DiCenzo is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author, with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan, of Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2011) and has published widely on early 20th-century feminist media. Barbara Green is Associate Professor of English and Concurrent Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture (Palgrave, forthcoming) and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Fiona Hackney is Professor in Fashion and Textiles Theories at Wolverhampton University. She is the author of Women's Magazines and the Feminine Imagination: Opening up a New World for Women in Interwar Britain (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming). She has published widely on women, design, and the decorative arts. List of Illustrations Acknowledgements General Introduction: Re-Mediating Women and the Interwar Period Part I Culture and the Modern Woman Culture and the Modern Woman: Introduction 1 ‘Tricks of Aspect and the Varied Gifts of Daylight’: Representations of Books and Reading in Interwar Women’s Periodicals 2 ‘A Journal of the Period’: Modernism and Conservative Modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial (1919–29) 3 Sketching Out America’s Jazz Age in British Vogue 4 Clemence Dane’s Literary Criticism for Good Housekeeping: Cultivating a ‘Small, Comical, Lovable, Eternal Public’ of Book Lovers 5 ‘The Magazine Short Story and the Real Short Story’: Consuming Fiction in the Feminist Weekly Time and Tide 6. Making the Modern Girl: Fantasy, Consumption, and Desire in Romance Weeklies of the 1920s 7 ‘Dear Cinema Girls’: Girlhood, Picture-going, and the Interwar Film Magazine Part II Styling Modern Life Styling Modern Life: Introduction 8 Now and Forever? Fashion Magazines and the Temporality of the Interwar Period 9 ‘Eve Goes Synthetic’: Modernising Feminine Beauty, Renegotiating Masculinity in Britannia and Eve 10 Miss Modern: Youthful Feminine Modernity and the Nascent Teenager, 1930–40 11 ‘The Lady Interviewer and her methods’: Chatter, Celebrity, and Reading Communities 12 The Picturegoer: Cinema, Rotogravure, and the Reshaping of the Female Face Part III Reimagining Homes, Housewives, and Domesticity Reimagining Homes, Housewives, and Domesticity: Introduction 13 Housekeeping, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Good Housekeeping and Modern Home 14 Modern Housecraft? Women’s Pages in the National Daily Press 15 Labour Woman and the Housewife 16 Friendship and Support, Confl ict and Rivalry: Multiple Uses of the Correspondence Column in Childcare Magazines, 1919–39 17 Documentary Feminism: Evelyn Sharp, the Women’s Pages and the Manchester Guardian 18 Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman): Ambivalent Domesticity in Women’s Welsh-language Interwar Print Media 19 Woman Appeal. A New Rhetoric of Consumption: Women’s Domestic Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s Part IV Feminist Media and Agendas for Change Feminist Media and Agendas for Change: Introduction 20 ‘Many More Worlds to Conquer’: The Feminist Press Beyond Suffrage 21 The Essay Series and Feminist Debate: Controversy and Conversation about Women and Work in Time and Tide 22 Internationalism, Empire, and Peace in the Woman Teacher, 1920–39 23 Providing and Taking the Opportunity: Women Civil Servants and Feminist Periodical Culture in Interwar Britain 24 Debating Feminism in the Socialist Press: Women and the New Leader 25 Ireland and Sapphic Journalism between the Wars: A Case Study of Urania (1916–40) Part V Women’s Organisations and Communities of Interest Women’s Organisations and Communities of Interest: Introduction 26 Housewives and Citizens: Encouraging Active Citizenship in the Print Media of Housewives’ Associations during the Interwar Years 27 Woman’s Outlook 1919–39: An Educational Space for Co-operative Women 28 A Periodical of Their Own: Feminist Writing in Religious Print Media 29 Women’s Print Media, Fascism, and the Far Right in Britain Between the Wars 30 ‘The Sheep and the Goats’: Interwar Women Journalists, the Society of Women Journalists, and the Woman Journalist Appendix Notes on Contributors Index