Lower-middle-class Domestic Leisure in Woman’s Weekly, 1930

Abstract

Eleanor Reed explores the status of domestic leisure in issues of Woman’s Weekly during 1930 when many middle-class housewives looked to labour-saving technologies to produce status-defining domestic leisure. Woman’s Weekly initiates and reflects the aspirations and anxieties of a readership eager to cement its position in an expanding, diversifying and competitive middle class. The magazine’s lower-middle-class distinctiveness emerges through comparison to Good Housekeeping, a glossy domestic monthly targeting middle-class housewives with larger budgets. Rather than following Pierre Bourdieu and others in portraying lower-middle-class culture as an inauthentic copy of leisure-class culture, this essay argues that Woman’s Weekly contributes to the production of an ideologically distinctive lower-middle-class domestic culture in which its readers can take pride. This culture is problematized however by its suspected source in the magazine’s unknown producers, some of whom were men; a circumstance alluded to in Stevie Smith’s 1936 Novel on Yellow Paper.