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

A unique intersection between periodical and literary scholarship, and class and gender history, this book showcases a brand-new approach to surveying a popular domestic magazine. Reading Womans Weekly alongside titles including Good Housekeeping, My Weekly, Pegs Paper and Womans 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, Womans Weekly targeted a lower middle-class readership: broadly, housewives and unmarried clerical workers on low incomes, who viewed or aspired to view themselves as middle-class. Examining the magazines distinctively lower middle-class treatment of issues including the First World Wars impact on gender, the status of housewives and working women, womens contribution to the Second World War effort, and Britains post-war economic and social recovery, this book supplies fresh and challenging insights into lower middle-class culture, during a period in which Britains lower middle classes were gaining prominence, and middle-class lifestyles were undergoing rapid and radical change.