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. As the journal moved into its second decade Lady Rhondda deliberately sought to achieve a balance between the number of male and female signatures in its pages, and its bills frequently advertised articles by prominent men. Early accounts of the periodical suggest that the increased visibility of men and male perspectives in its pages from the early 1930s represents a weakening of Time and Tide's feminism. However, Rhondda never advocated a separatist position, and her idea of Time and Tide as a ‘common platform’ for ‘thinking men and women’ (see Chapter 4) was consistent with her conviction that collaboration between the sexes was essential for the rebuilding of society and the survival of civilisation itself (John 2013: 431). In the years immediately following the passage of the Equal Franchise Act in July 1928 Rhondda gradually withdrew from active leadership of the feminist societies she had been so instrumental in forming, but only to devote more of her energies to Time and Tide (John 2013: 401). In 1930 she told the American feminist Doris Stevens: ‘If I can make the paper go in a big way (as is beginning to seem possible) I shall have done a big a thing for feminism as I am capable of.’ Continuing to pioneer a new field for women, the paper broadened its scope to address issues of international importance, and peace, constructing ‘modern women’ as ‘both national and global citizens’ with responsibilities alongside men in the public sphere. However, this expansion into traditionally male territory inevitably involved challenges. In a letter to Rebecca West in June 1931 Rhondda admitted that while Time and Tide's circulation and prestige continued to grow ‘we still suffer slightly from the fact that we are known to be a paper run by women’, a reminder of the prejudices that remained against women's advances in public life.

As Julie Gottlieb has discussed, ‘one of the main objections to women's enfranchisement was on the grounds that as a sex they were not suited to decide foreign and imperial affairs’ and this ‘distrust of women's political judgement on matters of war and peace’ persisted after the war and extended through the political crises of the 1930s (2013: 159).