A fresh perspective on women’s magazines in the interwar period

Dr Fiona Hackney, Award Leader MA Twentieth Century Art & Design: Histories & Theories was recently interviewed on BBC television's One Show as the academic expert on an item celebrating the centenary of Woman's Weekly, first published in 1911. 

Fiona's expertise in women's popular publishing resulted in her thesis:"They Opened up a Whole New World": Feminine Modernity, the Feminine Imagination and Women's Magazines,1919-1939, for which she was awarded a doctorate from Goldsmiths' College, University of London, earlier this year.

The project presents a fresh perspective on the women's press in the interwar period, challenging the widespread dismissal of them as uncomplicated and merely preoccupied with housewifery. It views these publications as ‘hybrid' products, an approach that moves on from characterisations of interwar magazines in terms of ‘conservative' or ‘domestic' modernity to argue instead that they ‘opened things up', particularly for the expanding readership among working and middle-class families: the wives and daughters of clerical workers, trades people and engineers, for example.

Magazines had a particular resonance for these women at a time when, having achieved the franchise on equal terms with men, improvements in housing, cheap mortgages, the introduction of electricity, access to hot running water, increased real incomes (for those in work), radio, cinema, cheap fashions and the possibility of better paid office or factory jobs, promised change. 

The thesis focuses on four magazines: Woman's Weekly, Home Chat, Modern Woman and Woman. It develops a tripartite approach, which includes a detailed investigation of the people and processes involved in creating the publications, analysis of selected publication runs, and oral history with around 50 women about their memories of reading magazines (supplemented by contemporary reading surveys). Women repeatedly reflected how their publications ‘opened up a whole new world', and the metaphor of the window: the magazine as ‘a room with a view' is adopted to explore how magazines offered diverse and sometimes utopian perspectives on modern womanhood.

Chapters on the social, historical and cultural contexts of production and receptions are followed by thematic chapters that explore: domesticity and the ‘housewife heroine'; ‘bachelor' girls and working women; new ideas about beauty, health and fitness; and attitudes to sex as expressed in romantic fiction and the problem page. 

This is the first detailed study of interwar women's magazines and, importantly, one that attends seriously to the visual as well as the textual dimensions of the media.  Additionally, through the exploration of a popular cultural form that was widely read by women, as well as actual women readers and producers of magazines (editors and others), the thesis contributes new insights into the lives and experiences of interwar women. 

Examiners Professor Angela McRobbie and Dr. Penny Tinkler gave high praise for the thesis and wrote: "What is particularly exciting about Fiona's approach is that she analyses not only the written work, which is the usual focus of magazines studies, but also the visual features including the layout, styles of lettering and the use of illustration, photography and colour.  This combination of textual and visual research generates sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the versions of womanhood presented to readers and the possibilities afforded by the magazines for diverse readings and pleasures.

....This is an outstanding piece of work. The pages of this remarkable research show how women, and especially younger women, found a voice in the world of magazines, even though they were of course being spoken to and indeed instructed by these forms of popular media.  This thesis should be published as it is, as a book as soon as possible.  It will find a place within social history and gender history as well as cultural and media studies as a key resource and wonderful historical rejoinder to current debates on similar themes."

Fiona is currently developing her thesis as a book for the publisher I. B. Tauris with a view to publication in 2013. 

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