<i>Woman’s Weekly</i> and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918–1958

Eleanor Reed’s Woman’s Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain 1918–1958 is “the first ever book-length study of a single British domestic magazine” (4). Despite being one of the most popularly recognizable women’s magazines in Britain, the Woman’s Weekly archive has remained remarkably unexplored until now—a sign of the times perhaps. Scholarly interest in women’s magazines, particularly in twentieth-century women’s periodicals, has continued to grow over the last decade (4). Reed references monographs by Laurel Forster, Catriona Clear, Alice Wood, and Catherine Clay, as well as recent essay collections devoted to women’s periodicals, including those edited by Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder, Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney, and Laurel Forster and Joanne Hollows, that “usefully position” (5) Woman’s Weekly, “an icon of twentieth-century British domestic culture,” (1) within the women’s magazine market and the wider scholarly field.Reed’s book engages periodical and literary studies, as well as scholarship on class and gender, to showcase a new methodological approach to the survey of a popular domestic magazine. Reading Woman’s Weekly alongside titles such as Good Housekeeping, My Weekly, Peg’s Paper, and Woman’s Own (referred to as “key ‘sister’ publications” [33]) and works by authors including E. M. Delafield, Daphne du Maurier, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Mary Stewart, and Virginia Woolf, the book positions the publication within both the contemporary magazine market and the field of literary studies more broadly. Reed approaches the domestic magazine as a literary genre in its own right, and in so doing responds to Patrick Collier’s concerns that literature is “underrepresented” in periodical studies and that periodical studies have so far done little to expand the field of literary studies.1 Demanding that scholars reevaluate what literature is, who writes it, and who reads it, Reed’s book works to not only renegotiate literary values but also redefine literary parameters.Launched on November 4, 1911, by the Amalgamated Press and published today by Warner-owned Time UK, Woman’s Weekly is the third longest-running British women’s magazine, behind My Weekly and The Lady. Between 1918 and 1958—Woman’s Weekly’s heyday, “when it boasted the third largest bought circulation in the women’s magazine market” (1)—the magazine, and its chiefly anonymous writers and editors, targeted a lower-middle-class readership: housewives and unmarried clerical workers on low incomes who viewed or aspired to view themselves as middle class. Throughout the years surveyed—encompassing the aftermath of World War I, World War II, a period of government-imposed austerity, and a boom in consumerism—the magazine’s contents remained largely unchanged: a blend mostly of romance fiction, advertisements, and instructional features offering advice in relation to homemaking, personal appearance, and social and professional conduct. The composition of the magazine did, however, alter over time. As Reed observes, “The amount of space occupied by material relating to the paid workplace dropped substantially after 1918–1919, and the balance between work and leisure-related content shifted towards the latter following the end of the Second World War” (229). Reed’s book examines Woman’s Weekly’s distinctive treatment of issues such as the First World War’s impact on gender, the status of housewives and working women, women’s contributions to the World War II effort, and Britain’s postwar economic and social recovery.In contending with what Collier refers to as the “unmanageable plenitude of texts,”2 Reed chooses as her method of selection a process that involves “taking soundings every ten years” and throughout World War II in order to analyze the development of Woman’s Weekly over a forty-year period. The focus of each of the book’s six chapters is “determined by the magazine’s contents during the year or years it addresses” (9). Chapter 1 explores issues of the magazine published between November 1918 and November 1919, assessing “the impact of the conflict on gender and the status of working women in a society to which demobilised servicemen were returning,” as well as the magazine’s characteristic “ambivalence towards leisure-class culture” (3) in relation to Delafield’s Messalina of the Suburbs, Dot Allen’s Makeshift, and du Maurier’s Rebecca. Chapter 2 examines issues from 1928 in relation to current affairs, leisure-class culture, the presentation of the desirability of upwardly mobile romance heroes, and the appeal of, in Reed’s words, “hands-on homemaking” (3), including motherhood alongside Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Priestley’s Angel Pavement. Chapter 3 surveys issues of the magazine published between September 1938 and September 1939, examining Woman’s Weekly’s construction of middlebrow and suburban culture in relation to Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady, Woolf’s Orlando, and Orwell’s Coming Up for Air. Chapter 4 discusses issues of the magazine published during World War II, offering readers guidance on performing national service within and without their homes, while chapter 5 examines magazines issued in 1948, assessing the publication’s attitude toward government-imposed austerity and paid employment for women alongside Marghanita Laski’s The Village and Tory Heaven; or, Thunder on the Right and Mary Stewart’s Thunder on the Right and Madam, Will You Talk? Chapter 6 discusses issues of the magazine printed in 1958, during which time husbands were encouraged to act as joint homemakers, the possibility of “working wifehood” (3) was acknowledged, and the publication became preoccupied with addressing a teenage audience in an attempt to secure its future. Readings drawn from Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors, Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, along with the aforementioned novels, are necessarily selective and brief, having been chosen, in Reed’s words, “because they highlight” by way of comparison with Woman’s Weekly “why the values and attitudes underpinning the magazine are distinctively lower middle class” (8) and yet emphasize how the women both presented in and targeted by the magazine differ from Delafield, Orwell, and Priestley’s negative representations of lower-middle-class female stereotypes.As Reed makes plain in her introduction, as a vehicle for promoting lower-middle-class domestic culture, Woman’s Weekly encouraged its readers to “critique high culture and distance themselves from leisure-class women” (31). Such “ambivalence towards leisure-class culture” (3), explored at length in chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6, as stated previously, defines the magazine throughout the period surveyed. As chapter 1 shows, “women who use imitation versions of leisure-class cultural forms to pretend leisure-class status lay themselves open to moral condemnation by the magazine, especially if they are ‘dressing up’ in order to attract men” (27). Woman’s Weekly or lower-middle-class readers’ superiority over both their faux and genuine leisure-class equivalents is confirmed in Mary Fortune Clegg’s “Rosemary Married,” printed in the magazine on August 6, 1919, and compared by Reed with du Maurier’s Rebecca.The focus of the second part of chapter 3—a series featured in the first Woman’s Weekly of each month between January and September 1939 titled “How to Acquire Culture” by an anonymous male columnist known as “The Man Who Sees”—is of particular interest to this reviewer. It relates to Reed’s argument throughout the book that Woman’s Weekly “presents lower middle classness as an identity to be coveted and cultivated, not as a source of potential shame” (31). Consisting of nine “Culture Talks” on the subjects of painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and architecture, the purpose of “How to Acquire Culture,” as articulated by Reed, was to help the magazine’s socially ambitious and yet relatively low-income readers engage meaningfully with the arts and, more specifically, with socially aspirational cultural works. Reed writes that photographs of artworks illustrated each “Talk” published in the magazine, though sadly no images are reproduced. Reed usefully points out that the series appeared at a moment when technologies of mass production were giving mass audiences access to artworks that had formerly been consumed largely in situ by those with the time and money to do so (121). Reed asserts that “How to Acquire Culture” belonged to the middlebrow, “a culture associated strongly with the lower middle classes during the interwar years,” and yet interestingly, as per the explicitly pedagogical nature of the column’s title, “the magazine’s version of the middlebrow is distinguished from other contemporary middlebrow works, . . . by an absence of pretence” (123). Notably, Reed argues, the implied definition of “high” art in “How to Acquire Culture” differs from that toward which “some other middlebrow readerships are supposed to aspire” (123). The point Reed makes here is that inasmuch as they are made accessible by the middlebrow, artworks are designated representative of high culture not by their intrinsic qualities but by their relation to the individuals who aspire to engage with them (124).Being cultured, according to The Man Who Sees, involves privileging the moral quality over the material quantity of one’s engagement with artworks, a more democratic state of mind available to “ordinary people” (129). Reed writes perceptively of Woman’s Weekly’s challenge to Pierre Bourdieu’s and Thomas Crosland’s claims about lower-middle-class culture: “It . . . demonstrates awareness that among the forms of leisure-class culture it sells are cheap imitations, its readers’ limited budgets not stretching to the real thing,” and “makes explicit its readers’ ignorance of high culture, addressing them openly as novices” (27), before adding that rather than seeking to propagate, in Rita Felski’s words, a “craven respect for high culture” (quoted on p. 26) among them, the publication invites its readers to question “the very notion of being cultured and urges them to critique, and even to reject, certain aspects of leisure-class lifestyles and identities, claiming moral superiority over leisured women in doing so” (27).Insisting that Woman’s Weekly readers view culture in terms of moral quality rather than material quantity, The Man Who Sees situates “How to Acquire Culture” within the ethical, liberal humanist dimension of the middlebrow, subsequently contextualized by Reed (in chapter 3) in relation to liberal humanist F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. Expressing concern about the destructive impact of mass culture and presenting “critical reading” as a means of reversing it, The Man Who Sees, Reed argues, exhibits a sense of citizenship very similar to that articulated by Leavis and Thompson. Thus, Reed asserts, what really distinguishes Woman’s Weekly readers from the lower-middle-class stereotypes recycled in Orwell’s Coming Up for Air is their capacity for critical thought, elaborating that while Orwell’s protagonist George Bowling views standardized suburbia and its unthinking inhabitants, including insatiably aspirational wives, as “producers of the authoritarian future he fears” (135), The Man Who Sees “urges Woman’s Weekly readers to engage critically with their social environment, recognise its moral deficiencies, and work to improve it” (135–36).The Man Who Sees’ “middlebrow, liberal humanist belief in the power of art to initiate positive social change” (138) is most apparent in his vision of an urban utopia in which readers’ desire for self-improvement fuels an impulse to become their communities’ moral guardians, this time embodied by art on public display. His focus on female sculptures places the responsibility for realizing these ideals onto women, rendering the fact that his target audience, as with Woman’s Weekly as a whole, is “demonstrably white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, monogamous, [and] able-bodied” (6) more than apparent. In Reed’s words, “In acquiring Culture, Woman’s Weekly readers become moral guardians of the ideal society they help to create” (139).To conclude, while Reed wisely restricts her study to the forty years following the date of the first Woman’s Weekly magazine issued after the armistice, its implications are far reaching in terms of positioning women’s domestic magazines within the field of literature and considering women’s domestic magazines as literary texts in and of themselves. By exploring Woman’s Weekly in relation to novels and domestic magazines, Reed’s book examines where and how the publication intersects with the romance and detective genres, the middlebrow, and, to a limited extent, the highbrow, as it appeals to and constructs the interests and aspirations of a readership drawn from a highly specific section of lower-middle-class British society (8).A book-length study focusing primarily on a single British domestic magazine, Woman’s Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain provides sustained and impressively detailed descriptions and analysis (though sadly not illustrations/reproductions) of a magazine treated throughout “as a multi-dimensional, composite text, comprising words, images, paper, and page design” (10). In so doing, Reed examines Woman’s Weekly’s contribution to the development and promotion of lower-middle-class culture—in particular, the culture of “housewives and unmarried clerical workers on low incomes” (230)—which has historically received less focused scholarly attention, over four decades of rapid and radical change in Britain. Countering the postwar erasure of middlebrow works from the European canon and resonating with the contemporary importance of the middlebrow, liberal, humanist belief in the power of art to initiate positive social change, I concur with Reed’s claim that this book “significantly broadens understandings of interwar, wartime and post-war reading culture” (230).