Woman's Weekly and Lower Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958

Abstract

This book draws on periodical and literary scholarship and class and gender history to showcase a brand-new approach to surveying a popular domestic magazine. Reading Woman’s Weekly alongside titles including Good Housekeeping, My Weekly, Peg’s Paper, and Woman’s Own, and works by authors including Dot Allan, E. M. Delafield, George Orwell, and J. B. Priestley, it positions the publication within both the contemporary magazine market and the field of literature more broadly, redrawing the parameters of that field as it approaches the domestic magazine as a literary genre in its own right. Between 1918 and 1958, Woman’s Weekly targeted a lower-middle-class readership: housewives and unmarried clerical workers on low incomes, who viewed or aspired to view themselves as middle class. Examining the magazine’s distinctively lower-middle-class treatment of issues including the First World War’s impact on gender, the status of housewives and working women, women’s contribution to the Second World War effort, and Britain’s post-war economic and social recovery, the book supplies fresh and challenging insights into lower-middle-class culture, during a period in which Britain’s lower middle classes were gaining prominence and middle-class lifestyles were undergoing rapid and radical change.