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

(Hardback)

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Description

Provides new perspectives on women's print media in interwar Britain
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.

Key Features
Presents new essays on women's print media in interwar Britain, revealing the diversity of genres addressed to women readers, from domestic magazines, pulps and women's pages to highbrow reviews and feminist periodicalsFeatures innovative, interdisciplinary research by recognized specialists in the fields of literary and periodical studies, and women's and cultural historyContributes to the recent expansion of scholarship on the interwar period by recovering overlooked or marginalized media and archival sources, as well as reassessing well-known commercial titlesDesigned as a 'go to' resource both for readers new to the field and for specialists seeking the latest developments in this area of research-opening up new directions and methodologies for modern periodicals studies and cultural history

Reviews

"Plurality of voices" aptly describes Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 19181939, 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 -- K. Lynass * CHOICE Connect *
This book is essential and exciting reading for all interested in the history of women in the inter-war period; an inter-disciplinary collection which explores a wide range of womens magazines including some like Eve and Labour Women which are all too often neglected. * Maggie Andrews, University of Worcester *

Author Bio

Catherine Clay is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of British Women Writers 19141945: Professional Work and Friendship (Ashgate, 2006) and has published articles and book chapters on interwar womens writing and womens journalism. Her new monograph, Time and Tide: the Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Maria DiCenzo is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on the British suffrage press in journals such as Media History and Womens History Review. She co-edited Feminism and the Periodical Press, 19001918 (Routledge, 2005) and authored Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2011) with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan. Her current research examines British and international feminist activism and periodicals in the interwar period. Barbara Green is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938, and a co-editor of Womens Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939. She was the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies from 2015 through 2022. Fiona Hackney is Professor in Fashion and Textiles Theories at Wolverhampton University. Her forthcoming monograph Womens Magazines and the Feminine Imagination: Opening up a New World for Women in Interwar Britain will be published by I.B.Tauris. She has published widely on women, design, and the decorative arts, and is Principal Investigator on a number of Arts and Humanities Research Council projects exploring the value of creative making and maker spaces as a means of community engagement.