A New Feminist Venture: Work, Professionalism and the Modern Woman

Abstract

This chapter discusses Time and Tide’s early feminist identity through an exploration of its close interdependence, and competition, within the feminist and women’s press. The magazine drew extensively on the networks associated with suffrage media and professional women’s magazines to build its early reader and contributor base, but from the beginning was also working to establish itself as a paper with a much broader reach. Through an analysis of Time and Tide’s editorial and self-marketing strategies, its relationship with male readers, and the staging in and outside its columns of a public debate about the ‘modern woman’, the chapter grapples with the paradoxical idea that the ‘new’ thing Time and Tide was doing was to disavow identification with the ‘feminist’ or ‘women’s periodical’ category at the same time as it remained both of these things.