The year 1928 marks the beginning of a new phase in Time and Tide's development. With the passage in Parliament of the Equal Franchise Act, which for the first time granted votes to women on the same terms as men, the periodical gradually rebranded itself as a less woman-focused, more general-audience publication, and worked intensively to secure a position among the leading intellectual weekly reviews of its day. Early assessments of this periodical have intimated that Time and Tide became less feminist as it moved into its second decade. However, this conclusion fails to understand Time and Tide's more complex relationship with Britain's interwar political and cultural landscape as it sought to broaden its appeal while continuing to serve the needs of feminism and of its core female readership. In October 1926, not long after Lady Rhondda took over the periodical's editorship, Vera Brittain (a contributor since 1922) wrote to her husband warning him: ‘if you ever talk of T.&.T. don't speak of it as a “women's paper.” They are very anxious to get it out of that category.’ Explaining that ‘it [Time and Tide] is a weekly review of life and politics run by women’ she differentiated it from such society magazines as the Queen and The Gentlewoman ‘which people always think of when you say “women's paper”’. As Margaret Beetham identifies, ‘the definition of femininity as incompatible with engagement in public affairs’ had become institutional in the nineteenth-century history of women's magazines (1996: 26). Rhondda was firm in her conviction that as a female-run weekly review Time and Tide was reinventing the category of ‘women's journalism’ and that as such it represented an important continuation of feminism in an equal rights tradition. In a letter to her friend and leading American feminist, Doris Stevens, she wrote in May 1927: