Women, Magazines and the Politics of Shopping: Holtby, Jameson and Woolf

Abstract

Shopping was a vital part of the housewife’s work in the interwar era, an activity extending from her domestic identity as homemaker but realized through economic participation in the public sphere. Directed by the consumer capitalism that sustained them, interwar women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping (UK) portrayed the modern female shopper as rational, informed, and empowered by her consumer choices. This article explores responses to consumer capitalism that trouble this ideal by Winifred Holtby, Margaret Storm Jameson and Virginia Woolf in the pages of Good Housekeeping. It demonstrates the different ways these three prominent interwar women writers critiqued consumerism in essays published in this highly commercialized periodical. Jameson drew attention to the pervasive power of advertising in ‘Money is not Happiness’ (March 1929) and ‘Advertising as a Career for Women’ (August 1928), a contribution to Good Housekeeping’s serial careers column. Holtby considered the relationship between consumption and social class in ‘The Sable Standard’ (March 1932). In ‘The Docks of London’ (December 1931) and ‘Oxford Street Tide’ (January 1932), Woolf examined the exploitative workings of imperial trade and the capitalist illusion of the democratic availability of goods. Each of these writers, I argue, urged Good Housekeeping’s readers to engage critically with the politics of shopping.

Keywords:

• consumerism
• advertising
• Winifred Holtby
• Storm Jameson
• Virginia Woolf

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Good Housekeeping (UK) is included in my study of Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines (Wood 2020), but the magazine does not often draw the attention of literary critics with the exception of those interested in Woolf’s six Good Housekeeping essays, later collected as The London Scene (2004) and reprinted in The Essays of Virginia Woolf (Woolf 2009a), which are discussed later in this article. The book essays of regular Good Housekeeping columnist, Clemence Dane (Winifred Ashton), have also notably been explored by Stella Deen (2018).

2 On the EMB’s poster campaigns, see Constantine 1986.

3 I have written on the history of this commission and Woolf’s reputation in Good Housekeeping previously in Wood 2010.

4 On Woolf’s involvement and activism in the Guild see Wood 2014 and Jones 2016.