This book contributes to a long-running debate about the impact of the First World War, postwar industrial stagnation, widespread unemployment, and the rise of a mass consumer society on relations between the sexes during the interwar years. Adrian Bingham contends that gender historians’ lack of detailed attention to the popular newspapers in studies of interwar culture has reinforced a one-sided and somewhat predictable set of assumptions about the strength of domesticity and the opposition to female emancipation in this period. He disputes the arguments of 1970s and 1980s feminist historians that the media operated in the interests of patriarchy as a tool of women's oppression, seeing newspapers rather as “the sites of an ongoing discursive contest between various and diverse images of femininity and masculinity in which a number of different interests were represented” (11).

This insight, while it is hardly new and allies itself with more recent cultural analysis by feminist scholars, sets the stage for an engaging and nuanced analysis of five of the most popular national daily newspapers of the day: the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Herald, and the Daily News/News Chronicle. Bingham justifies his selection of papers on the grounds of circulation figures and the wide spectrum of political and class approaches they cover. He does not, however, engage with the more difficult issues of whether national newspapers based in London should be regarded as English rather than British, how far these papers were read in other countries within the United Kingdom, and what impact English dominance of the popular press had on Scottish, Welsh, and Irish readers.

Nevertheless, Bingham makes excellent use of his sources. As well as the newspapers themselves, these include editorial and proprietorial archives, press journals dairies, and memoirs. These materials open a window onto editorial attitudes and decision-making processes, while market researchers’ surveys and Mass Observation records give some indication of contemporary readers’ responses. The strength of his work is in his analysis of interactions between different categories of sources. These show gendered discourses and often contradictory representations of masculinity and femininity that cannot be understood without a broader knowledge of the political and commercial contexts in which the papers were produced. Had he had more time, some oral history interviews with press employees might have added a further dimension to this analysis.

One of the book's most persuasive arguments is the extent to which the press was feminized in this period. Newspaper representations, not only of domesticity and motherhood, but also of the newly enfranchised “modern women,” were designed to attract a female readership. These were not simply aimed at increasing the circulation figures. Women's purchasing power as consumers also attracted advertising revenue from the fashion industry, which was extremely lucrative and could be essential to a paper's survival. Female interests were thus ignored by proprietors at their peril. An image of the front page of a 1920 edition of the Daily Mail entirely devoted to fashion advertisements graphically illustrates this point.

Bingham shows the danger of ignoring female purchasing power by looking at the changing fortunes of the Daily Herald. Run by the Trade Union Congress through the 1920s and dedicated to the “workers perspective,” its lack of commitment to a female audience severely restricted its advertising revenue and circulation figures compared with its competitors. However, its relaunch in 1930 by a new proprietor who increased the space devoted to advertising, features, photographs, and human interest stories brought a dramatic upturn in its fortunes, and by 1933 the Herald became the first paper to sell over 2 million copies.

The book's main message is that labels such as progress or retreat are oversimplistic in relation to gender. Representations of the modern woman in the popular press had, Bingham argues, a mediating influence on the cult of domesticity. The papers encouraged women readers to experience new freedoms vicariously both at work through the promotion of exciting and glamorous career opportunities, and at leisure, where the introduction of more relaxed dress codes and social conventions came to signify modernity. Yet these images were presented and viewed through a prism of sexual difference, which sexualized women, subjected them to the male gaze, and reinforced stereotypical notions of feminine beauty. Bingham notes the separation of men's and women's sections of the paper and points to contrasting gender stereotypes in reports and photographs. Interestingly, he reproduces these divisions in the structure and content of his book. Representations of femininity are analyzed separately from those of masculinity, with the latter given much less space and discussed mainly in the last two chapters. He justifies this imbalance on the grounds that women were regarded as the sex and that masculinity was a less contested terrain than femininity. While this may be a valid argument, understanding the interrelationship between these two categories is vital and could have been more effectively shown if a discussion of both masculine and feminine discourses had been integrated into each chapter. I was also surprised, given the imperial anxieties that characterize this period, that so little mention was made of connections between “race” and gender. There is little indication of how were men and women of “other” ethnicities were represented in these papers or of how far images of feminine and masculine beauty equated with being white.