Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s
The Postwar and Contemporary Period
Edited by Laurel Forster, Joanne Hollows
- Examines changes and continuities as women’s magazines have moved into digital formats
- Highlights the important cultural and political contexts of women’s periodicals including the Women’s Liberation Movement and Socialism
- Explores the significance of women as publishers, printers and editors
Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s draws attention to the wide range of postwar print cultures for women. The collection spans domestic, cultural and feminist magazines and extends to ephemera, novels and other printed matter as well as digital magazine formats. The essays examine both mainstream and independent publishing for women. They consider the history of publishing for women, the social contexts, and the ways in which the publications were used and understood by their readers over this long postwar period.
The collection reflects in detail the important ways in which magazines and printed matter contributed to, challenged, or informed British women’s culture. A range of approaches, including interview, textual analysis and industry commentary are employed in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the impact of postwar print media may be understood.
List of IllustrationsContributor biographies Introduction: Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, the Contemporary Period - Laurel Forster
Section I: Publishing Industries and Practices
1. Culture Versus Commerce: The Publishing of Feminist Books Since the 1940s - Gail Chester
2. Spare Rib and the Print Culture of Women’s Liberation: Collaboration, Experimentalism and Feminist Publishing Praxis - Lucy Delap and Zoe Strimpel
3. The Impact of the Women-Only Publishing Phenomenon on Early Second-Wave. Feminism, Literature and Culture - Catherine Riley
4. Producing a Lesbian Magazine at the turn of the Twenty-first Century - Georgina Turner
5. ‘Hey, here’s the new way’: Young Women’s Magazines in Times of the Web 3.0 - Laura Favaro
Section II: Interacting with Readers
6: ‘There is a War on. Does She Know?’: Transatlantic Female Stardom and Women’s Wartime Labour in British Film Fan Magazines - Lisa Stead
7. ‘The Most Helpful Friends in the World’: Letters Pages, Expertise, and Emotion in British Women’s Magazines, c. 1960–1980 - Tracey Loughran
8. ‘Everything a Girl Could Ask For’? Fashioning Feminism in Just Seventeen - Melanie Waters
Section III: Tastemaking: Arts and Culture
9. ‘When is a writer not a writer? When he’s a man’: Women’s Literary Award Culture in Britain 1940–2019 - Stevie Marsden
10. Arena Three Magazine and the Construction of the Middlebrow Lesbian Reader - Amy Tooth Murphy
11. Always in with In Crowd: Vogue and the Cultural Politics of Gender, Race, Class and Taste - Estella Tincknell
12. ‘Leaps and Bounds’: Feminist Interventions in Scottish Literary Magazine Culture - Eleanor Bell
13. Promoting Involvement in Performance: Performing Arts Journals and Women Writers, 1945–65 - Charlotte Purkis
Section IV: Feminisms and Activisms
14. ‘It’s Capitalism, not me sweetheart’: Women’s Activist Magazines on the Left - Victoria Bazin
15. Women’s Voice, the Rise and Fall of a Socialist-Feminist Newspaper in Britain 1972–82 - Sue Bruley
16. Spare Rib, Ms. and Reproductive Rights: a Comparative Analysis of Approaches - Claire Sedgwick
17. Digital Feminist Cultures - Kaitlynn Mendes
18. ‘Alive, practical and different’: Harpies & Quines and Scottish Feminist Print in the 1990s - Rachael Alexander
Section V: Negotiating Femininities
19. ‘Doing Food’ in Vogue - Janet Floyd
20. Frank - Frocks, Politics, Lipstick, Handbags, Human Rights, Babies, Gardening, Stilettos and Fridge Magnets - Mary Irwin
21. Writing about Mothering and Childcare in the British Women’s Liberation Movement, 1970–1985 - Sarah Crook
22. Beyond Utility: Pushing the Frontiers in Women’s Monthlies: Modern Woman 1943-1951 - Fiona Hackney
AppendixIndex
From wartime labour to Web 3.0, from recipes to reproductive rights: this book reveals the full range of topics covered in women's periodicals. Many areas of feminist print activism come into view for the first time, and the essays demonstrate the crucial role of print culture in the lives of women readers. Invaluable.
