Modernism and Modernity in British Women's Magazines

Alice Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351967396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women's magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper's Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book's analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity's broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women's Magazines extends recent research into modernism's circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women's magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism's public profile.

1 Mediating Modernity

In her influential The Gender of Modernity (1995), Rita Felski observed that ‘the idea of the modern saturates the discourses, images, and narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ and provocatively asked: ‘How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women?’¹ Commercial women’s magazines of this period were profoundly shaped ‘by the attempt to situate individual lives and experiences in relation to broader historical patterns and overarching narratives of innovation and decline’.² The four interwar women’s magazines surveyed in this study addressed their readers as informed and discerning spectators of and participants in modernity. ‘The novelty of female entry into what, until the first decades of the twentieth century, had been predominately a masculine public realm did not pass unnoticed in the commercial press’, as Fiona Hackney has identified, and ‘women’s achievements in sports, the arts, and government, as well as the latest innovations in female dress, were regularly splashed across the media, including newspapers and magazines’.³ Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar were all shaped by the new rights and opportunities opening up for women in interwar Britain and we can find examples of articles and images in each that position women’s activities in the public sphere (as voters, graduates, sportswomen, writers, politicians, etc.) as representative of modernity. Equally significant and far more pervasive, their routine consumer, domestic, and fashion pages were also inscribed with narratives of transformation and progress. These interwar magazines convey an array of contrary attitudes to the contemporary moment, including reverence of and contempt for tradition as well as fear and delight at the new.

‘To view modernity from the standpoint of consumption rather than production’, Felski contends, puts ‘femininity at the heart of the modern’.⁴ From the late nineteenth century, ‘the consumer was frequently represented as a woman’ and ‘her status as consumer gave her an intimate familiarity with the rapidly changing fashions and lifestyles that constituted an important part of the felt experience of being modern’.⁵ Mass-market women’s magazines, just like urban department stores, emphasized women’s purchasing power as the nation’s primary shoppers and created a space for them to explore new identities through their real, or imagined, consumption.⁶ Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan have argued that ‘fashion offers an important means to expand our understanding of the relationship between femininity and modernity by allowing us to draw connections between women as symbols or objects and women as agents of the modern’ and ‘to see how women navigated their position as modern subjects’.⁷ Not only did consumption and fashion draw women into public commercial spaces, but, as Felski notes, ‘modern industry and commerce encroached ever more insistently on the sanctity of the private and domestic realm through the commodification of the household’.⁸ Judy Giles explores how women ‘were positioned at the forefront’ of the shift towards a consumer-orientated economy in the early twentieth century as ‘the “modern” home, run by a “professional” housewife’, became ‘the place where the practices of getting and spending found their most potent expression’.⁹ ‘The figure of the housewife was equally emblematic of modern life in the period as the female politician, the film star, or the sportswoman’, Hackney claims, and ‘was certainly more ubiquitous’.¹⁰ In her pivotal study of conservative modernity, Alison Light suggests that the interwar years ‘mark[ed] for many women their entry into modernity’ through ‘new kinds of social and personal opportunity’ from ‘tennis clubs’ and ‘cinema-going’ to ‘new patterns of domestic life’ and ‘the disposable sanitary napkin’.¹¹ ‘[E]ven if a new commercial culture of “home-making” was conservative in assuming this to be a female sphere’, Light poses, ‘it nevertheless put woman and the home, and a whole panoply of connected issues, at the centre of national life’.¹² Women were addressed as modern subjects across interwar British Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar through their consumption, their dress, and their private and public roles as homemakers, workers, and citizens.

This chapter explores some of these contexts alongside introducing the four magazines that are the subject of study in this book. It provides an account of the publication history, editorship, format, and typical content of Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar during 1918–39 and close analysis of a single issue of each magazine. This method is informed by the second chapter of Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture (2015), in which Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith practise four different levels of periodical analysis to compare the different kinds of insights each level brings. Their multi-level approach ‘mov[es] from a focused reading of the elements which make up a single page or issue towards broader generalisations about shifts over time’ that result from reading an annual volume or a magazine across several decades.¹³ This chapter practises two of these levels of reading in order to supply both a broad summary of the evolution of these magazines over the course of my period of study (chiefly 1918–39, though British Vogue is considered from its 1916 launch here) and focused reading of their visual and textual elements and some of the interactions between editorial, feature, and commercial matter within an individual issue. The issues chosen for analysis have been selected at random from across the interwar period. They are typical, as much as they can be, of each magazine at the time of publication. Notably, they have not been selected for their attention to modernism. While modernism will be the lens through which my reading of these magazines is focused in the chapters that follow, this opening chapter attends instead to their routine content, material features, and their diverse approaches to defining and negotiating the modern. In particular, it gestures towards some of the multiple ways in which interwar Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar mediate modernity in relation to women’s experience. I aim to provide an overview of each title that will be helpful to anyone seeking an introduction to these magazines in the interwar years and which lays the broad foundations for my interrogation of their treatment of modernism in the chapters to come.

Vogue

Vogue began life in December 1892 as a weekly magazine of fashion and society news ‘for a small circle of socially elite New Yorkers’ founded by Arthur Baldwin Turnure, a Princeton graduate and socialite.¹⁴ It was purchased in 1909 by Condé Nast, a young American previously employed as advertising manager for Collier’s magazine, who

saw in Vogue a chance to test his theory, developed while he was an advertising man, that there was a place for a medium which would bring together without waste circulation the persons who could afford luxury goods and the persons who wished to sell them.¹⁵

Edna Woolman Chase, general editor of Vogue from 1914 to 1952, later recalled that ‘[Nast] didn’t want a big circulation; he wanted a good one’.¹⁶ He converted Vogue to a semi-monthly publication, introduced colour covers from 1910, and employed modern artists and photographers to create a visually arresting high-class fashion and society journal that could generate a large income from the sale of advertising space. Its early issues established many of the serial features that would remain central to Vogue in the interwar period such as ‘Seen in the Shops’, ‘Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes’, and the theatre column ‘Playhouse Gossip’, which became ‘Seen on the Stage’.¹⁷ British Vogue was launched in 1916, French Vogue appeared in 1920, and an attempt to establish a German Vogue was made in the late 1920s, though this last was unsuccessful.¹⁸ The British and French editions were edited autonomously from London and Paris respectively, with Chase as Editor-in-Chief of the three Vogues from New York.

British Vogue emerged during the First World War when wartime restrictions on non-essential transatlantic shipping impeded sales of American Vogue in England, which had reached more than 12,000 copies by 1916.¹⁹ From July 1916, copies of Vogue sold in the UK differed in content from the American edition with some features produced specifically for a British audience, such as a series of caricatur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mediating Modernity
• 2 Modernism in Fashion
• 3 Dissident Voices and Feminist Experiment
• 4 Modernist Reputations
• Coda
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index