Abstract
‘If a future chronicler were to study the files of our newspapers,’ speculated the novelist Rose Macaulay in a lecture to the feminist Six Point Group in November 1925, ‘he would get the impression that there had appeared at this time a strange new creature called woman who was receiving great attention from the public.’1 Because ‘men insisted on generalising about women’, Macaulay noted, newspaper readers were faced with the ‘great and increasing nuisance’ of articles about women’s lives and interests; ‘I am,’ she lamented, ‘always being rung up or written to by some newspaper and asked what my opinion is.’ The questions posed by the press ranged from dilemmas in personal lives — ‘should clever women marry?’ — to the impact of female enfranchisement. ‘“How will the women vote!” they ask before elections’, she observed, identifying too the implication that ‘sex formed some kind of bond in the women’s political world, and that neither ternperament, nor education, nor economic conditions counted for anything.’ If too much was written about Woman ‘with a capital W’, joked Macaulay, ‘she may come to life like Frankenstein’s monster.’2
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Notes
Manchester Guardian, 13 Nov. 1925, cited in The Guardian Centwy: The Twenties (London: The Guardian, 1999), p. 5.
Ibid.
G. Harrison with F. C. Mitchell and M. A. Abrams, The Home Market (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1939), ch. 21; A.P. Wadsworth, ‘Newspaper Circulations 1800–1954’, Manchester Statistical Society Transactions, 4, Session 1954–55; C. Seymour-Ure, ‘The Press and the Party System between the Wars’, in G. Peele and C. Cook (eds), The Politics Of Reappraisal (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 233–9; T. Jeffery and K. McClelland, ‘A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes 1918–39’ in J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (eds), Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 28–39.
On the significance of the press in British culture, see A. Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–78 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 15–28. For a useful summary of agenda-setting and interpretative frameworks, see C. McCullagh, Media Power: A Sociological Introduction, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
See, for example, B. Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); D. Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918–39 (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 8; M. Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement 1914–59 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), chs 4, 7; C. Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement 1918–28 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), p. 205; S. Bruley, Women in Britain since 1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 62.
See A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 1.
Karen Hunt, ‘Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption’, Women’s History Review, 9/2 (2000), pp. 389–410.
K. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 154.
On the Empire Free Trade campaign see A. Chisholm and M. Davie, Beaverbrook: A Life (London: Hutchinson, 1992), chs 14–15.
Manchester Evening News, 21 July 1930, p. 4, cited in C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 55.
A. Bingham, “‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly”: Rothermere, the Daily Mail and the Equalisation of the Franchise 1927–28’, Twentieth Century British History, 13/1, (2002), pp. 17–37.
L. Beers, “A timid disbelief in the equality to which lip-service is constantly paid”: gender, politics and the press between the wars’, in L. Beers and G. Thomas (eds), Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-building in Britain between the Wars (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2012), pp. 129–48.
House of Lords Record Office, Beaverbrook Papers, H/91, Beverley Baxter to Beaverbrook, 5 Jan. 1932.
R.C.K. Ensor, ‘The Press’, in Sir Ernest Barker, (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 418–19.
J. Curran, A. Douglas, and G. Whannel, ‘The Political Economy of the HumanInterest Story’, in A. Smith, (ed.), Newspapers and Democracy: International Essays on a Changing Medium (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), pp. 294, 318–19.
Political and Economic Planning, Report on the Press (London, 1938), p. 250; Bodleian Library, Oxford, X. Films 200, Mass Observation, File Report All, ‘Motives and Methods of Newspaper Reading’; Dec. 1938, p. 15; File Report 126, ‘Report on the Press’, May 1940, p. 4; File Report 1339, ‘Report on Daily Express Readership’, June 1942, p. 18.
M. Stott (ed.), Women Talking: An Anthology from the Guardian Women’s Page (London: Pandora, 1987), p. xv.
V. Brittain, Why Feminism Lives (London, 1927), cited in P. Berry and A. Bishop, (eds), Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (London: Virago, 1985), p. 97.
Cited in P. Thane, ‘What Difference did the Vote Make?’ in A. Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Politics (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 255.
Ibid., p. 254.
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© 2013 Adrian Bingham
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Bingham, A. (2013). Enfranchisement, Feminism and the Modern Woman: Debates in the British Popular Press, 1918–1939. In: Gottlieb, J.V., Toye, R. (eds) The Aftermath of Suffrage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333001_6
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