The Voice of Women

Chapter 5, ‘The Voice of Women,’ argues that the domestic magazine Good Housekeeping supported women’s active participation in civic forums throughout the 1920s and beyond. Alongside Dane, it surveys the journalism of Violet Bonham Carter, Helena Normanton, Rebecca West, and Rose Macaulay, who each posited the responsibility of newly enfranchised women to rehabilitate postwar society. Good Housekeeping’s long features and uninterrupted columns of print expressed confidence in women’s power of concentrated reading, implicitly rejecting the news media construction of the “soft” woman reader, while its feminist journalists advocated women’s self-directed learning and independent thinking. The chapter demonstrates shared concerns, such as Rebecca West’s and Clemence Dane’s emphasis on reading for engaged citizenship; and it notes the divergence between journalists advocating legal equality with men and those underscoring the strengths of women’s difference. Yet through their strategic use of features native to the periodical, especially the cross-referencing of literary and political material, the journalists collectively asserted the continuity of readers’ literary, ethical, and political sensibilities. The chapter concludes that Good Housekeeping editors, feminist journalists, and readers formed a periodical community, a print space describing and planning women’s educational and political advancement.