1 - A New Feminist Venture: Work, Professionalism and the Modern Woman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2021
Summary
Time and Tide made its first appearance before the public on 14 May 1920 and attracted a high degree of media interest; both national and provincial newspapers complimented the new weekly on its independent outlook, its interesting and readable content, and its fine list of contributors. Curiosity in the new venture was aroused particularly by its all-female board of directors; as one contemporary reader later recalled, ‘[a]s a journalistic innovation made exclusively by women the experiment intrigued us’ (Brittain 1940: 142). This perception that Time and Tide was doing something new in contemporary journalism is important. According to its founder, Lady Rhondda, Time and Tide was ‘a paper of a class that has never been run by women before’, and from the outset it sought to distinguish itself not only from mainstream organs of the press but from other feminist periodicals too. Yet, for all its appearance as a new feminist venture, in the history of feminist publishing Time and Tide in fact drew on a long tradition of periodicals run by women, including ‘movement and advocacy papers, avant-garde periodicals, literary reviews aimed at feminist readers, and more’ (Green 2009: 191). The early years of the twentieth century saw an upsurge of feminist periodicals published in association with the women's suffrage movement, and many of Time and Tide's first contributors were drawn from these periodical networks. As this chapter will show, Time and Tide's early promoters were keenly aware of their competitors in the feminist periodical market and savvy in their use of existing traditions at the same time as they departed from them. Michael North reminds us that ‘[t]o innovate is, in Latin at any rate, to renew or to reform, not to start over afresh’, and arguably periodicals have a particularly strong purchase on what North describes as ‘the complex nature of the new’ (2013: 3; 69). As Faith Binckes discusses:
The very periodicity of magazines implies a textual culture with an almost infinite capacity to renew itself and an equally prodigious capacity to reproduce itself. It is hard to imagine a form more suited to the construction of newness, but a newness consistently contested, competitive and remade. (2010: 55)
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- Information
- Time and TideThe Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine, pp. 15 - 40Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018