‘The Modern Weekly for the Modern Woman’: Time and Tide, Feminism and Interwar Print Culture

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which one of Britain’s most significant feminist magazines, Time and Tide (1920–79), constructed a modern feminist identity through its interactions with other feminist print media and with the mainstream interwar press. At once drawing on a long tradition of feminist periodical publishing, from the outset this women-run magazine also worked to distance itself from the feminist label in order to take up a position among the leading general-audience weekly reviews. Exploring the tension Time and Tide negotiated over its feminist designation, the article also demonstrates the central role this magazine played both in feminist debates about ‘work’ in this period and in wider public debates about the ‘modern woman’. If Time and Tide’s disavowal of the ‘women’s paper’ category was part of what made this feminist magazine ‘modern’, its commitment to women’s participation in the public sphere is one that would sustain it throughout the interwar years and beyond.

Keywords:

• Time and Tide, women’s periodicals
• feminism
• professionalism
• leisure
• modern woman

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following archives for permission to use unpublished materials in their collections: Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries; The Women’s Library, London; and Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. The images are reproduced with the permission of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Women’s Engineering Society.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 After a brief merger with John O’London’s in 1963–4, Time and Tide became chiefly a business magazine and published its last issue in 1979.

2 Elizabeth Robins Papers, 30 April 1920, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

3 Elizabeth Robins Papers, 4 May 1920.

4 Time and Tide’s remaining first directors were Mrs Chalmers Watson, Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, Miss Christine Maguire and Mrs H. B. Irving (née Dorothea Baird).

5 For a recent discussion of this media, see DiCenzo et al. (2011).

6 A selection of these articles—on topics ranging from politics and the vote to employment, education and birth control—is reprinted in Spender (1984).

7 Elizabeth Robins Papers, Rhondda to Robins, 22 February 1920.

8 Elizabeth Robins Papers, 13 August 1920.

9 Rhondda communicated to Robins in a letter dated 13 January 1921 that the programme had been ‘reported on at some length in the Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian, and one or two other papers’ (Elizabeth Robins Papers).

10 Elizabeth Robins Papers, 15 June 1921.

11 Tusan records the ‘falling circulations’ of both the Woman’s Leader and the Vote during the 1920s (Tusan 2005: 216). The Woman’s Leader began, like Time and Tide, as a 24-page magazine, but by October 1924 it was only 8 pages and had dropped its price from twopence to a penny. In an article looking back on ‘The Woman’s Leader 1928’, a ‘definite increase in our regular subscribers’ was identified as essential to the paper’s survival (4 January 1929: 375); in contrast, Time and Tide expanded in October 1928, increasing in size (from 24 to 32 pages) and price (from fourpence to sixpence).

12 The Woman Engineer was printed on a far higher quality of paper than any of the other trade magazines I have looked at, allowing for the high-quality reproduction of photographic and other visual material, as well as clean, stylish print.

13 Modern Woman was launched just three months earlier, in June 1925.

14 The conference was held at the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, in July 1925.

15 Rhondda to Haslett, 17 November 1925; Haslett to Rhondda, 25 November 1925, British Federation of University Women Papers, The Women’s Library, London.

16 For a more detailed discussion, see John (2013: 379–84).

17 For a discussion of labour and selfhood in this period, see Shiach (2004).

18 Time and Tide’s first board of directors included one trade unionist, Christine Maguire, but she resigned before the end of the periodical’s first year. The future Labour Member of Parliament, Mary Agnes Hamilton, served on the board of directors for a brief period from 1921, and contributed regularly to the paper’s book review columns for more than a decade. Another key figure was the socialist poet Eleanor Farjeon, whose contributions to the paper are discussed in my forthcoming book, Time and Tide: the Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine, 1920–1939.

19 Schreiner’s famous cry, ‘Give us labour and the training that fits us for labour!’, was printed at the start of the second article (22 October 1926: 946).

20 Maria DiCenzo and Alexis Motuz deal with these debates in more detail in their contribution to this issue.

21 Elizabeth Robins Papers, 5 April 1926.

22 I am indebted to Maria DiCenzo for this observation. For a discussion of Linton, see Broomfield (2004).

23 Rhondda to Doris Stevens, 27 March 1927, Doris Stevens Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number: AH/1021299/1] and the British Academy.