“ Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!. . . Heaven save us from a lower stage.”
Thus the aged Wordsworth on illustrated books and newspapers. His tetchy complaint was uttered in 1846, when developments in printing technology and the growth of railway travel were creating both the demand and the technical means for cheap, bright periodicals. W. H. Smith opened his first bookstall in 1848; “light reading” became the popular—and, after the Education Acts, the universal—means of passing time. Wordsworth saw only the beginning of it all.
Something like nine hundred magazines are published in this country at the present time. The most popular is “Reveille,” which is bought every week-end by three and a half million people; next are “Woman” and “Woman’s Own,” each with over two million readers, and there are half a dozen other weeklies with circulations of more than a million.
Fashions in popular reading change from generation to generation. The most successful and the most ephemeral magazine is the one which measures most accurately what the general public wants; you can please quite a lot of the people for quite a lot of the time, but you must be prepared for a drop in circulation when the nature of public consciousness alters. On the other hand, the longest-lived magazines are those with restricted appeal; “The Countryman,” “The Sporting and Dramatic News” and “The Spectator” are examples. Women’s magazines have the best of both worlds. Their appeal is limited, but limited to half the community; they have the certainty of a known field of interest, and the field is large enough to necessitate the devices and techniques that make for mammoth circulation.
There are nineteen weekly magazines for women. “Home Notes,” the oldest, first appeared in 1894, and the foundation dates of the others are fairly evenly spread between then and 1937, when “Woman” was first published. Looking at them over the years—or even at their predecessors of Wordsworth’s day—one is mildly surprised at how little they have altered. Here is “Woman’s Weekly,” 1912, price a penny: “Great New Year’s Gift Number,” with a Gibson girl on the cover. Patterns; a powerful new serial by Annie S. Swan; readers’ best recipes; lace work; home nursing; . health and beauty page; Dainty Cupid Leap Year Charm given free to subscribers; “Ethel” replying to girls’ problems and my-dearing them for all she is worth.
The difference between the weekly and the monthly magazines is chiefly of pretentiousness and price. If any feature can be said to mark the frontiers, however, it is the “help page.” The monthlies try to do without it; to the weeklies, it is life’s blood. A lot of people believe that the problems are made up by the magazine’s editorial staff. In fact, “human problems” is the busiest of all the advice services—legal, child-care, beauty and furnishing are others—which are offered by the women’s magazines. A weekly of average popularity receives anything up to two hundred letters a week; most are answered by post, and only a selection is printed. The confidantes are all homely women with homely-sounding names; Mrs. Jim, Mary Grant, Evelyn Home. It is easy enough to snigger at the help page with its jealousies and frustrations and frailties, its girls in trouble, possessive mothers and lonely virgins. The problems are real enough to those who have them, and the answers, for the most part, are sensible and to the point.
Every magazine devotes at least one other page to letters. Readers write about their romances, their hobbies, their families, their jobs, their favourite food, their hopes and ambitions. Half-a-guinea or a guinea is paid for each published letter; as a link with readers' consciousness, they are probably cheap at the price—they may even explain why a women’s magazine seldom goes out of business.
It is on this pabulum of everyday life that the stories thrive. The “Garden of Allah” type of escape- story, best-selling between the wars, was never really the stuff for women’s magazines, though occasionally it appeared. The great bulk of the stories have workaday and domestic life as their settings. There is no obvious fantasy, no escapism into past, future or distant worlds, and the harshest realities of this world—war and unemployment—come in as often as they are topical. It takes some time to realize that this realism is an illusion; that the ordinary life of the stories is not ordinary at all, that the hard facts are not hard at all, and that the whole is a fantasy-world into which most of its readers can easily project themselves.
The domestic life of these stories is life on the fifteen-pounds-a-week level—what most people consider to be “middle-class” life. Nice houses with bathrooms and telephones, plenty of good clothes, tasteful furniture and the rest. True, the heroines sometimes are shop assistants or married to clerks; the only possible conclusion is that they are living above their incomes. Nobody wears Marks-and-Spencer dresses, lives with shoddy furniture, lacks elementary education or becomes unattractive from continual child-bearing. It is the daydream world of “if-only"; if only we won a few thousand on the pools, if only Henry’s firm promoted him, etc.
Unemployment and war never really make much difference. The most terrible thing about unemployment in real life is that the wolf does not just howl at the door, but comes right in and stays; in the women’s magazine story, Henry always finds another job and a new day dawns bright and clear. War puts the hero in uniform as a pilot or a commando officer (never a private in the Pay Corps); coming home wounded, he leans on a stick or has one arm in a sling. The atmosphere is that of a fancy-dress party where the guests have nothing to declare but their ingenuousness.
The world of women’s magazine stories can be summarized as something like this. You are an attractive, smartly-dressed woman of your own age, sitting in the lounge of a sizeable semi-detached house. There are flowers on the sideboard and “Vogue” on the coffee table. If you are single, in a little while you will bath and put on your new evening frock because a handsome young man in well-cut clothes and a Jaguar is going to call to take you out to the theatre. If you are married, your two nicely-spoken children are playing hide-and-seek in the garden; Henry—tender, wise and patient—will soon be home from the City; you will never become a worn-out drudge because your home has all the labour-saving gadgets advertized in the women’s magazines.
That is approximately the nature of the make-believe. There are two things which must be noted about it. The first is that it is a mistake to assume, as many people do, that the writers who create and populate this world are bad writers. Actually, theirs is one of the most highly skilled branches of journalism in the world; it is a trade, not an art, and they are first-class practitioners of it. The second thing is that the make-believe obviously feeds a real and continuous hunger. A well-to-do person in urban society has access to variety of experience, a member of a healthy primitive community has depth of experience; a working-class woman usually knows neither. The craving for romance is the craving for either or both of those filings. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” contains a remarkable passage in which a working girl named Gerty MacDowell has a romantic daydream; the dream is a series of images and phrases straight from the pages of innumerable women’s stories.
Roughly one-sixth of the space in an average magazine is taken up by stories. Advertisements cover something like half the total space, and most of the remainder is occupied by articles on female and domestic affairs—cookery, dress-making, health and beauty, fashion, make-do-and-mend, child care, plus one or two items such as a sentimental verse and a horoscope ("Your financial position will improve about next Friday”). Reading these columns of advice on how to bring up baby, how to stay good-looking and what to cook for supper, one sees how vastly public consciousness has altered in the past half-century. The outsize family, with its yearly childbirth, its unkempt, fagged-out mother and its bread-and-jam diet is nearly non-existent today in Britain (except in areas with large Catholic populations, where ignorance and fear keep it going). Most people nowadays really care about their standard of living and really want to bring up their children well; the findings of nutrition experts and child psychologists make their way to, and to some degree are acted upon by, working people. The convention of “what was good enough for my father is good enough for me” has largely disappeared. In 1903, women’s magazines offered cheap patterns for dust-caps and aprons; in 1953, they explain how to make dresses which, from a short distance and for a short time, look as if they came from Norman Hartnell. A great deal of ignorance and dirt and superstition (in spite of the horoscopes) has disappeared; people of all ages are more humane, more responsible, and more conscious of their environment.
Popular reading matter always has a good deal to tell us about the social life and attitudes of its time. What springs most irresistibly from a study of women’s magazines is how unchanged are the basic concerns of life for working-class women. In spite of suffrage, admission to almost every career and profession, and the consequent thirty-year clamour over equality of the sexes, the fundamentals are still the same: finding husbands, rearing children and managing homes. Going to work is not an exchange for these concerns, it is an addition to them, and married women who go to work do so mostly to help finance their homes. “Woman’s place is in the home,” which is usually put forward as an arguable proposition, is really nothing of the sort, but a simple statement of fact.
Living in a working-class home means being involved in the perennial problem of insufficient money. For the single woman, it limits severely the probable area for finding a husband; for the married woman, it means having to make the money go round, and leading an extremely flat and unvaried life in the process. It is this economic blockade from the real world of experience that leads to escape into a fantasy-world, where domesticity is bliss, every cloud has a silver lining and there is true romance for all except the bad girls.
The moral obviously is not to pooh-pooh or condemn women’s magazines as purveyors of baby talk and life-by-proxy. They pass on fairly necessary information and advice about domestic matters, and have probably been influential in spreading more responsible social attitudes. Most people of today want things to be better; “good enough for the likes of us” is a sentiment that no longer has much share in working-class consciousness. As for the stories, possibly they are bilge. That does not, however, answer the question why the majority of working-class women need to have a fantasy-world created for them, and a large number need to have decisions on the management of their lives made for them by a completely unknown Mrs. Jim or Evelyn Home. The truth obviously is that there is something fundamentally wrong with a society in which such needs are so widespread.
Robert Barltrop
1 comment:
Barltrop once again channelling his Orwell as essayist style.
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