Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s

Laurel Forster is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at University of Portsmouth. Her research interests are in women's cultural history, women's magazines and women's modernist writing. She is author of Magazine Movements: Women's Culture, Feminisms and Media Form (Bloomsbury 2015) and numerous other articles on women's magazines and media cultures. She has co-edited a number of books including: Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement in the Western World: 1960-1999 (Routledge 2018); British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010), The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions (Ashgate 3003).

Foregrounds the diversity of periodicals, fiction and other printed matter targeted at women in the postwar period
Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s draws attention to the wide range of postwar print cultures for women. The collection spans domestic, cultural and feminist magazines and extends to ephemera, novels and other printed matter as well as digital magazine formats. The essays examine both mainstream and independent publishing for women. They consider the history of publishing for women, the social contexts, and the ways in which the publications were used and understood by their readers over this long postwar period.

The collection reflects in detail the important ways in which ways magazines and printed matter contributed to, challenged or informed British women's culture. A range of approaches, including interview, textual analysis and industry commentary, is employed in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the impact of postwar print media may be understood.

Laurel Forster is Reader in Women's Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth. She is the author of Magazine Movements: Women's Culture, Feminisms and Media Form (2015) and numerous articles on women's magazines, modernist literature and cultural history.

Joanne Hollows is a writer and independent researcher who previously had a long career teaching in British universities. She is the author of Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (2000), Domestic Cultures (2008) and Media Studies: A Complete Introduction (2016).

List of Illustrations; Contributor biographies; Introduction¿: Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, the Contemporary Period, Laurel Forster; Section I: Publishing Industries and Practices; 1.¿ ¿Culture Versus Commerce: The Publishing of Feminist Books Since the 1940s, Gail Chester; 2. ¿Spare Rib¿ and the Print Culture of Women's Liberation: Collaboration, Experimentalism and Feminist Publishing Praxis, Lucy Delap and ¿Zoe Strimpel; 3. ¿The Impact of the Women-Only Publishing Phenomenon on Early Second-Wave. Feminism, Literature and Culture, Catherine Riley; 4. Producing a Lesbian Magazine at the turn of the Twenty-first Century, Georgina Turner; 5. 'Hey, here's the new way': Young Women's Magazines in Times of the Web 3.0, Laura Favaro; Section II: Interacting with Readers; 6: 'There is a War on. Does She Know?': Transatlantic Female Stardom and Women's Wartime Labour in British Film Fan Magazines, Lisa Stead; 7. 'The Most Helpful Friends in the World': Letters Pages, Expertise, and Emotion in British Women's Magazines, c. 1960-1980, Tracey Loughran; 8. 'Everything a Girl Could Ask For'? Fashioning Feminism in ¿Just Seventeen, Melanie Waters; Section III: Tastemaking: Arts and Culture; 9. 'When is a writer not a writer? When he's a man': Women's Literary Award Culture in Britain 1940-2019, Stevie Marsden; 10. ¿Arena Three¿ Magazine and the Construction of the Middlebrow Lesbian Reader, Amy Tooth Murphy; 11. Always in with In Crowd: ¿Vogue¿ and the Cultural Politics of Gender, Race, Class and Taste, Estella Tincknell; 12. 'Leaps and Bounds': Feminist Interventions in Scottish Literary Magazine Culture, Eleanor Bell; 13. ¿Promoting Involvement in Performance: Performing Arts Journals and Women Writers, 1945-65, Charlotte Purkis; Section IV: Feminisms and Activisms; 14. 'It's Capitalism, not me sweetheart': Women's Activist Magazines on the Left, Victoria Bazin; 15. ¿Women's Voice¿, the Rise and Fall of a Socialist-Feminist Newspaper in Britain 1972-82, Sue Bruley; 16. ¿Spare Rib,¿ ¿Ms.¿ and Reproductive Rights: a Comparative Analysis of Approaches, Claire Sedgwick; 17. Digital Feminist Cultures, Kaitlynn Mendes; 18. 'Alive, practical and different': Harpies & Quines and Scottish Feminist Print in the 1990s, Rachael Alexander; Section V: Negotiating Femininities; 19. 'Doing Food' in Vogue, Janet Floyd; 20. ¿Frank -¿ Frocks, Politics, Lipstick, Handbags, Human Rights, Babies, Gardening, Stilettos and Fridge Magnets, Mary Irwin; 21. Writing about Mothering and Childcare in the British Women's Liberation Movement, 1970-1985, Sarah Crook; 22. Beyond Utility: Pushing the Frontiers in Women's Monthlies: Modern Woman 1943-1951, Fiona Hackney; Appendix; Index.