Introduction

Women's magazines were already well established at the beginning of the twentieth century and had benefitted from the economic, technological and social changes that drove the expansion of publishing. Advertising had become an integral feature of the genre, helping to reduce cover prices and support production costs (White 1970: 63). While the pre-war magazine market concentrated on society titles for the leisured class, the inter-war period saw the growth of weekly and monthly titles catering for expanding middleclass readerships (White 1970: 63). These often glossy productions have always addressed women as shoppers and consumers, managers of personal and domestic budgets and guardians of familial morality and emotional relationships. However, it is the potential of women's magazines to address their readers as political beings and to serve as a vehicle for feminism that is the focus of this chapter. This ambition was first seen in The English Woman's Journal (1858–64). Produced by predominantly upper-middle-class women of independent means, it aimed to stimulate debate about women's education and employment, reforming legislation on married women's status and women's enfranchisement (Rendall 1987; Dredge 2005). The magazine's small but dedicated middle-class readership and its short publication run are not untypical of overtly feminist political magazines. In contrast, our focus here is on spaces and places in which this educative political discourse seeps into more mainstream publications bought for pleasure.

In the long twentieth century, the women's magazine format has been adapted and re-invented to ensure that it continues to occupy a prominent place on news-stands. As women's political, economic and cultural position in British society has changed, magazines have been a space where shifting and contested ideas of femininity can be worried over and worked through, where the pursuit of politics and pleasure may be combined. As both the industry and individual publications seek to negotiate the tensions and dichotomies of twentieth century discourses of femininity, women's magazines are inevitably contradictory and inconsistent texts, manoeuvring between the private and public, aspiration and practicality, feminism and femininity, the individual and the social, and between pleasure and politics.