'Housekeeping, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Good Housekeeping and Modern Home'

Date

2018-01-01

Advisors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Type

Book chapter

Peer reviewed

Yes

Abstract

This article interrogates the framing of women as citizens through domestic work in two interwar women's magazines. Directed towards an aspirational lower-middle-class female audience, George Newnes's Modern Home identified homemaking as women's chief role and service to the nation and explicitly addressed its readers as English or British citizens. The National Magazine's Company's Good Housekeeping was solidly middle class in outlook with an undertone of internationalism in the interwar period. This magazine conversely insisted on women's citizenship both within and outside the home and urged its housekeeping readers to consider their values, responsibilities and potential power as citizens in international as well as national terms.

Description

Keywords

Women's Magazines, Domesticity, Women's Citizenship, Interwar

Citation

Wood, Alice, 'Housekeeping, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Good Housekeeping and Modern Home', in Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period, ed. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), pp. 210-224.

Rights

Research Institute