‘A Common Platform’: Male Contributors and Cross-Gender Collaboration

Abstract

This chapter examines another key element in Time and Tide’s rebranding as a more general-audience weekly review: the increase of male writers within its contributor base. Early accounts of the periodical suggest that this shift in the early 1930s represents a weakening of Time and Tide’s feminism. However, this chapter argues that the signatures of male contributors including George Bernard Shaw, St John Ervine and Wyndham Lewis were strategically deployed to advertise the paper beyond its core readership; it also considers the uses of anonymity for women who continued to occupy key editorial and staff positions. Discussing the contributions of Time and Tide’s youngest director, Winifred Holtby, as well as parodies by E. Delafield and short stories by Naomi Mitchison, the chapter explores the strategies by which Time and Tide sustained its commitment to female culture and through cross-gender collaboration created a ‘common platform’ for both thinking women and men.