Beyond Utility: Pushing the Frontiers in Women’s Monthlies: Modern Woman 1943-1951
- Submitting institution
-
Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 257792
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Postwar and Contemporary Period
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- ISBN
- 9781474469982
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
D - Fashion
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘Beyond Utility’ focuses on Modern Woman, a mid-range women’s monthly magazine, in the years during and immediately after the Second World War. It argues that a new consciousness of the power of female citizenship emerged at this time that should be revisited today. Building on observations about an ‘emergent feminist consciousness’ in the magazine Housewife from 1943 (Forster 2015: 47) and claims that, from 1946, the ‘frontiers of modern women’s journalism’ were expanding due to increased controversial content in women’s monthly magazines (White 1970: 130), the chapter uncovers how this new consciousness unfolds in Modern Woman’s editorial, fashion and domestic features in 1943, 1946 and 1951. It includes new material about the publication’s editorial team and journalistic decision-making. Contextualising shifting discourses in editorial, advertising and illustration, it identifies how the publication offered readers new identities and affordances as active, politicised citizens. The chapter appears in the edited collection, Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s (Forster and Hollows, 2020), in the series The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain, which has been formative in bringing the latest scholarship on women’s print culture to national and international audiences. The collection spans domestic, cultural, and feminist magazines, incorporates ephemera, novels and digital magazines and draws attention to the diverse discourses, messages, formats, readerships and appeals that contributed to, challenged, or informed British women’s print culture. It includes contributions from young scholars and such established figures as Lucy Delap (University of Cambridge) and Janet Floyd (KCL). Hackney’s chapter builds on and develops her arguments about women’s agency and interwar magazines (1999, 2008, 2016, 2018) applying them to the distinct circumstances of women’s war-time lives, and publishing. Textual and visual analysis provide new readings of primary material locating it within wider social, political, economic discourses in women’s publishing.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
