Women and the Media

Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present

Maggie Andrews, Sallie McNamara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135106904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Feminismo y teoría feminista

The media have played a significant role in the contested and changing social position of women in Britain since the 1900s. They have facilitated feminism by both providing discourses and images from which women can construct their identities, and offering spaces where hegemonic ideas of femininity can be reworked. This volume is intended to provide an overview of work on Broadcasting, Film and Print Media from 1900, while appealing to scholars of History and Media, Film and Cultural Studies.

This edited collection features tightly focused and historically contextualised case studies which showcase current research on women and media in Britain since the 1900s. The case studies explore media directed at a particularly female audience such as Woman's Hour, and magazines such as Vogue, Woman and Marie Claire. Women who work in the media, issues of production, and regulation are discussed alongside the representation of women across a broad range of media from early 20th-century motorcycling magazines, Page 3 and regional television news.

Part I

Women and Media in the Era of Enfranchisement, 1900–1939

Suffrage agitation, whether involving peaceful protest, mass demonstrations or more militant activities such as non-payment of tax and window smashing, has perhaps dominated histories of women in the Edwardian era. Yet when writing the first history of the movement, Ray Strachey emphasised that even as early as 1928, The Cause (1988) was about more than the vote. Groups of women campaigned on a range of issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century including improved access to education and maternity grants. Arguably, the campaign for women’s suffrage can be seen as the tip of an iceberg; beneath the surface the fluid and unstable discourses of femininity were being contested in a range of areas and media texts. Thus ‘the Woman Question’, as it became known, framed debates about what activities were suitable for women. Rosie Whorlow and Sallie McNamara’s chapter on women motorcyclists traces some of this contestation around the suitability of motorcycling as a leisure activity for women as it was played out in the pre-World War One motorcycling press.

Popular mythology and some history has presented World War One as liberating for women (Marwick 1977; Braybon and Summerfield 2012) but recent historiography has suggested a more nuanced and complex picture of both the era and the increasing participation of women in paid wartime work. The Representation of the People Act in 1918 gave women over thirty with some property, and almost all men, the right to vote. In 1928, women were enfranchised on the same terms as men. Academic debate continues over what activities precipitated this change, Pugh arguing that by 1908 public opinion was convinced by the arguments for women’s suffrage (2002) but that it was delayed by the machinations and self-interest of party politics, while Purvis places greater significance on militant suffrage activities both prior to and at the outbreak of war (1999). During World War One ‘[t]he number of women employed increased from around 4.9 million in 1914 to around 6.2 million in 1918’ according to Gerry Holloway (2005), although they were not necessarily welcomed. A significant number of those who went to work in wartime munitions factories, a job which would exist only for the duration of war, came from domestic service or had been engaged in casual, temporary or piece work prior to the war.

Many married women, if they could afford it, were less than enthusiastic about paid work outside the home, seeing it as a double burden on top of their domestic duties, and were not necessarily reticent to leave work at the end of the war. The inter-war economic crisis hit traditional industries which were male dominated; ship building, mining and steel suffered and unemployment rose. A hesitant and uneven recovery occurred in the nineteen thirties with many of the job opportunities in new industries such as the growing car industries in the midlands or female employment in service and entertainment industries.

The inter-war period saw the development of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and its transformation, under the directorship of John Reith, into the public service / publically funded broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The growth in newspaper consumption continued, as the period also saw what Curran and Seaton describe as the ‘era of the press barons’ (2003). The Harmsworth brothers controlled newspapers ‘with an aggregate circulation of over six million—probably the largest press group in the western world’ (Curran and Seaton 2003, 39). Both Kate Murphy’s and Sallie McNamara’s chapters demonstrate how women carved out working opportunities within these media industries. Murphy charts how a series of women who worked in the BBC Talks department, particularly those involved in the production of morning Household Talks, produced programming which enhanced and enriched other women’s lives. Employment patterns were not the only things disrupted by wartime and the economic crisis that followed, and Sallie McNamara explores how one woman writer, Lady Eleanor Smith, through her newspaper gossip column, articulated the complex reworking of the boundaries of society in a time of uncertainty and change. Opportunities to pursue a literary career or work at the BBC, like the freedom facilitated by cars and motorcycling, were arguably available only to educated, often single, women of the wealthier classes. (Many jobs such as the civil service, nursing and teaching operated a marriage bar.)

By the 1930s, however, media consumption made leisure opportunities widely available to working-class women and enabled them to broaden their horizons. The radio which was ‘the friend in the corner’ (Moores 2000, 28) brought education, news, current affairs and, especially when listening to European commercial stations such as Radio Luxemburg, entertainment into the majority of homes. The weekly or even twice-weekly trip to the cinema was a staple entertainment for many women. For many, the glamour and spectacle of Hollywood productions and stars were the most popular, but British stars such as Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews, Cicely Courtneidge and George Formby helped maintain the British industry with audience-pleasing light entertainment. Publications such as Picture-goer emphasised the more down-to-earth attributes of British stars, while Fields’s working-class background was positively embraced both in film and in the popular press as she was constructed as a ‘national treasure’, or the ‘Lancashire Britannia’ as Jeffrey Richards has argued (Richards 1984).

The rise in leisure activities such as radio and cinema attendance was one example of the contradictory nature of the inter-war years (Pugh 2009; Gardiner 2000). The worldwide economic depression by no means affected everyone or every region in the same way; for those with staple jobs the cost of living went down; consumer culture in the form of new chain stores (Winship 2000) and mass entertainment rose whilst Butlins opened their first holiday camp in 1936 at Skegness. Simultaneously, maternal mortality rates rose (Webster 1982) and for many women, as Elizabeth Roberts’s oral history has documented (1995), the struggle to manage was unrelenting. In these circumstances at the outbreak of World War Two, both feminism and femininity were variable, unstable and intertwined. The Six Point Group campaigned for both equal pay for teachings and satisfactory legislation for widowed and unmarried mothers. Alternatively, women’s organisations such as the National Federation of Women Institutes campaigned for greater recognition, support and acknowledgement of the skill of rural domestic housewives (Andrews 1997). The ‘home fit for heroes’, which had been fought for in the First World War, became culturally increasingly significant in the 1920s and 1930s with women expected to play a central role in it; what this role was, however, was both variable and contested.

Bibliography / Sources

Andrews, Maggie. 1997. The Acceptable Face of Feminism. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Braybon, Gail, and Penny Summerfield. 2012. Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars. London: Routledge.

Curran, J., and Jean Seaton. 2003. Power without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting, and New Media in Britain. London: Routledge.

Gardiner, Juliet. 2010. The Thirties: And Intimate History. London: Harper Press.

Holloway, Gerry. 2005. Women and Work in Britain since 1840. Routledge. Kindle edition.

Marwick, Arthur. 1977. Women and War 1914–1918. London: Harper Collins.

Moores, Shaun. 2000. Media and Everyday Life in Modern Society. Edinburgh University Press.

Pugh, Martin. 2002. The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914. Oxford University Press.

Pugh, Martin. 2009. We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars. London: Vintage.

Purvis, June, and Sandra Holton. 1999. Votes for Women. Women and Gender History. London: Routledge.

Richards, Jeffrey. 1984. The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Roberts, Elizabeth. 1995. Women and Families. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Strachey, Ray. (1928) 1988. The Cause: Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain. London: Virago Reprints Library.

Webster, Charles. 1982. ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’ History Workshop Journal 13 (Spring 1982): 110–129.

Winship, Janice. 2000. ‘New Disciplines for Women and the Rise of the Chain Store in the 1930s.’ In All the World and Her Husband, edited by Maggie Andrews and Mary Talbot, 44–60. London: Continuum.

1 Representations of Women’s Motorcycle Riding 1903–1914

‘Elated, Exhilarated and Emancipated’

Rosey Whorlow and Sallie McNamara

Introduction

This chapter brings together two aspects of what social researchers Charles Booth and B. Seebohm Rowntree (in Beck 2008, 456) referred to as a ‘national urge for leisure’ in the late Victorian and Edwardian period: motorcycling and magazines. It suggests that motorcycling magazines served as prisms for an exploration of the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the pre-World War I era. James Walvin (1978, 123) has argued that ‘by the turn of the century … it was widely accepted that everyone had a right to the enjoyment of leisure’. Peter Beck goes on to comment that what was deemed ‘acceptable, educational and “improving” forms of “leisure”’ (Beck 2008, 457), for the industrial proletariat, were activities which included brass bands, choral societies, municipal parks, ‘organized, codified modern sports and various activities provided by voluntary associations with church and chapel affiliations’ (Beck 2008, 457). The degree to which women accessed and utilized the new leisure opportunities remains an area of historical debate (Beavan 2005; Beck 2008). Within the national urge for leisure cycling became an increasingly popular pastime, which Clare S. Simpson notes peaked for women around 1896–97 (2007, 49). The Times claimed in 1898 that ‘the bicycle brought a new dimension to British social life in the 1890s … few corners of British society remained untouched by cycling’ (Beck 2008, 457). Simultaneously, the sport of motorcycling grew and although perceived as a masculine sport, it was one in which women were increasingly visible.

The growing popularity of motorcycling was evidenced by the production of publications specifically aimed at Motor Cycle enthusiasts of this period: The Motor Cycle was published by Liffe and Sons in 1903, whilst Motorcycling Magazine was introduced by Rivals Temple Press in 1910. Simpson has argued that for middle class women the bicycle offered ‘unique opportunities to move spontaneously and independently beyond accepted geographic and social boundaries’ (2007, 49–50). She further draws attention to both the class base of bicycling and motorcycling and the special significance of the sport for women in furthering social change by challenging conventional practices, beliefs and values (Simpson 2007, 49). Both domestic and financial constraints worked against the participation of working-class women in cycling, an issue accentuated ‘by the reluctance of upper- and middle-class women as well as working-class men to share their sport’ (Beck 2008, 465). Simpson points out that women’s participation in cycling was not always viewed in a positive light and similar claims can be made for motorcycling. Consequently, media texts became a space within which slippage occurred between debates over women’s participation in motorcycling and wider contestation over gender roles and women’s place in society.

The Edwardian period has left historians with a plethora of sources to draw upon to gain some understanding of the experiences of women who lived at this time. Magazines like The Motor Cycle and Motorcycling Magazine provide access to the everyday assumptions, preconceptions, concerns and experiences of Edwardian women generally as well as those who were Motor Cycle enthusiasts. Situated within the broader context of shifting discourses of gender in the period, these magazines demonstrate how women utilized what might be considered predominantly masculine media spaces for their own purposes. Crucially, motorcycling media enabled women to challenge the ‘myth’ of the Motor Cycle as being a ‘man’s’ machine at a point in time when women were campaigning for increased participation in a range of areas once considered as masculine spheres. There has been much discussion of the suffrage campaigns in the period, and how these provoked wider debate about women’s roles (Joannou and Purvis 2009). However, it is important to note that battles about what constituted acceptable femininity were not solely confined to women’s suffrage, but were disseminated throughout popular culture. This chapter suggests that women contributors and readers appropriated spaces within the motorcycle media to share and discuss the challenges, experiences and emancipatory potential of motorcycle riding.

The Significance of Motorcycle Journalism in Turbulent Times

The Edwardian period was a complex transitional time when Britain was moving away from the values of the Victorian period (Van Vuuren 2011, xiii). Three areas facilitated this: Edwardian leisure, issues of gender and the New Woman, and developments in the press and magazines. The ‘urge for leisure’ must, as Beck argues, be viewed ‘against a backdrop of urban, industrial and demographic change … reductions in working hours and increased spending power’ (Beck 2008, 456). Access to specific sports and leisure, while dependent on class and economics, was also gendered. Although women, with the necessary leisure time and economic standing, were starting to participate more widely, Beck comments:

Sport reinforced rather than challenged gender stereotypes, and it remained difficult for women either to infiltrate key sports defining masculinity or to undermine existing perceptions of womanliness. Women were firmly excluded by most sports associations. (2008, 464)

Debates concerning the ‘New Woman’, the sexually independent woman seeking opportunities for self-development outside of marriage, were also important (Showalter 1992, 38–39) for she was seen as a deviant woman, a signifier of gender crisis, notably in a series of associated novels (Beetham 1996, 117). Linking leisure and attitudes to gender, Sally Ledger has drawn attention to concerns around the New Women on bicycles, garbed in bloomers, who were seen as ‘a product of the campaign for rational dress at the fin de siècle’ (1997, 26) and perceived to be ‘creating fears of the “unwomanly woman”’ (1997, 26). As Ledger notes, the recurrent theme of fin de siècle cultural politics was instability, and gender was arguably the most destabilizing category (1997, 22) due to the increasingly vociferous campaign for female suffrage. During the Victorian period women’s rights had become an established issue with some significant progress being made by the women’s movement, and the issue of women’s suffrage was firmly on the political and social agenda. Lucy Delap has suggested many historians of the Edwardian era have equated suffrage activism and feminism, assuming ‘that the main focus of Edwardian politics was the acquisition of the vote’ (cited in Ardis 2009, 628). However, positioning Edwardian feminism within such a narrow focus misses the ways that in this ‘tense and formative period’ there was division and conflict between ideas of women’s emancipation’ (Ardis 2009, 628.). Much of this conflict was played out in the public sphere within the press and magazines. During the late Victorian and early Edwardian period the cultural meaning of ‘print...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Women and Media in the Era of Enfranchisement, 1900–1939
• Part II: Women in War and Peace: The 1940s and 1950s
• Part III: The Long 1960s: Cultural Revolution?
• Part IV: 80s and 90s: Thatcherism and Its Legacy
• Contributors
• Index