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

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.

Catherine Clay is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Time and Tide: the Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (EUP, forthcoming) and has published widely on British interwar women's writing and journalism.

Maria DiCenzo is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author, with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan, of Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2011) and has published widely on early 20th-century feminist media.

Barbara Green is Associate Professor of English and Concurrent Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture (Palgrave, forthcoming) and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Fiona Hackney is Professor in Fashion and Textiles Theories at Wolverhampton University. She is the author of Women's Magazines and the Feminine Imagination: Opening up a New World for Women in Interwar Britain (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming). She has published widely on women, design, and the decorative arts.