“Magazines are essentially about the here and now. And this was wartime”: British Vogue’s Responses to the Second World War

Abstract

There is now an established literature on the role British women’s magazines played in extolling the double-edged tenets of female “beauty and duty” in WWII Britain.¹ Sonya O. Rose convincingly argues in her acclaimed book. Which People’s War?, that “glamour” and what she dubs “sexualized femininity” were “marshalled” at various levels of popular and official discourse “to make acceptable the ‘gender-bending’ obligations of citizenship for women” during the Second World War in Britain.² She provides, among many, the example of Antoine, one “famous man”, writing in the spring of 1940 in the popular Woman’s Own magazine of his “ideal woman”. There he told British women that their combination of “age old vanity” and “new courage” meant that they were “ready for anything — even the continuance of your coiffure in an air-raid shelter whilst a battle royal is raging overhead”.³ Other British scholars such as Janice Winship, Lucy Noakes and Jo Spence have examined Woman’s Own and Woman magazines and have found, like Rose, that the ideal female citizen during WWII was expected to make a “vital contribution to the war effort while maintaining her femininity”.⁴