'What we might expect - if the highbrow weeklies advertized like the patent foods': Time and Tide, advertising, and the 'battle of the brows'

Abstract

This essay examines both the advertising content and a discourse about commercial culture in the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Taking a cue from Sean Latham and Robert Scholes's emphasis on advertising as 'a vital, even crucial part of the material culture that is the focus of the 'new periodical studies', I consider in particular Time and Tide's status as a commodity as well as a cultural object in order to tell a wider story about the relationship between women, feminism and the public sphere in Britain between the two world wars. Launched on 14 May 1920 Time and Tide began as an overtly feminist review of politics and the arts, directed and staffed entirely by women, and later evolved into a less woman-focused, more general audience journal, establishing a position among the leading political weeklies in Britain. As will be shown below, Time and Tide relied on women and the existence of a feminist counterpublic sphere to build its early readership base. But in an era still prejudiced against women's involvement in politics, Time and Tide was forced to compromise its overt identification with female and feminist cultures in order to secure its reputation for serious political journalism. In June 1938 the journal's founder and editor, Lady Margaret Rhondda, revealed in a private letter to Virginia Woolf: The general public is convinced that what women have to say on public affairs cannot have any real weight, so that if one uses many women's names ones circulation &-again-ones advertising are affected. I go through the paper every week taking out women's names and references to matters especially concerning women because if I left them in it would soon kill the paper. But it is maddening