Women in Wartime brings a potentially rich but hitherto underutilized source to the historian: Picture Post magazine, a British weekly publication founded in 1938. It was a pioneer in photojournalism, and as such—as Geraldine Howell points out—the magazine has much to offer social and cultural historians. In this book, she uses the magazine issues from 1938 to 1945 in order to discuss the impact war had on dress, fashion, and fashionability in Britain. In an introductory chapter that identifies Picture Post’s influences—among which she includes Henry Mayhew and the contemporaneous social research organization Mass Observation and earlier German illustrated weekly magazines—Howell argues that the publication constitutes a reliable archive for her investigation. She quotes editors, writers, and photographers to elucidate their aims and intentions, from which she concludes that they wanted to present “truthful and genuine visual and written narratives” (23). Moreover, while the magazine remained politically unaligned, she says it was an activist publication that “sought to promote a fairer and safer future for all” (15). Howell argues that Picture Post deserves to be considered as “an authoritative and reliable witness” (8) generally, and that its dress and fashion stories reflected “how women acquired, wore or used clothes during everyday life in a period of unparalleled turmoil and how hostile conditions impacted on style and health and beauty culture” (23).

The remaining eight chapters of Women in Wartime focus on various aspects of the topic. Chapter 1, “Beauty's Blueprint,” explores what can be learned from the magazine's stories about conceptions of female beauty and how these shifted with the coming of war. Howell argues that Picture Post was not proscriptive: rather than advocating a narrow definition of beauty focusing on a slender figure and a well-groomed appearance, “it allowed for many adaptations and modifications on this generic theme” (39). The second chapter describes a number of fashion stories that appeared in the magazine between 1938 and 1940. After “a final exuberant flowering” (41) in the last year of peace, Howell says fashion underwent a transition with the coming of war, which was characterized by uniforms; masculine elements of dress, such as trousers; and “a simpler, less adorned aesthetic” (41) of traditional feminine style. Chapter 3 looks at the clothing options during the same years—1938 to 1940—for those who could not afford to be fashionable, and in so doing, Howell's focus shifts somewhat. Picture Post ran a series of articles on various working-class communities in London, and, she says, “the stories are … as much about the people, places and problems that together conditioned how clothes were acquired and worn as they were about the clothes themselves” (59, Howell's emphasis). She ends the chapter by referring to a J. B. Priestley article in Picture Post that argued that war was an opportunity to overcome the great inequalities of the prewar period and to “fashion a really healthy society” (70). The issues of beauty and clothing do seem to have become a bit lost in the quest for the greater good by the chapter's end.

The fourth chapter looks more closely at the fashion trends apparent from articles in the magazine during the war. Howell says the changing nature of women's employment helped shape fashion, with new forms of dress, like uniforms and trousers. Nevertheless, seasonal fashion trends did continue to exist during the war, although women's clothing styles became more practical and less opulent and fussy. In chapter 5, Howell explores the impact that rationing and austerity had on women's clothing. She says trends became more subtle, with changes occurring in details or accessories. Women generally had to make items last longer, whether through careful use or recycling. Chapter 6 focuses on articles about women's wartime clothing initiatives. These were chiefly voluntary groups, ranging from knitting circles to clothing exchanges, that created or acquired clothing for those in need. Chapter 7 focuses on making and looking after clothing, especially as set out in the various articles on sewing and knitting. The eighth chapter, which explores women's physical fitness, seems to sit a little uneasily apart from the concerns with clothing that are the central focus of the book. Either the discussions on beauty needed to be more developed or perhaps the book more clearly organized into separate sections on beauty and fashion. Chapter 9 is a fascinating exploration of the British reaction to Parisian couture after the liberation of France. Before the liberation, Picture Post had run articles indicating that Parisian fashion remained luxurious and opulent but had become the preserve of Nazi women and French collaborators, rather than French women generally. After the liberation, the magazine's tone shifted: it now claimed that French designers had served the French people by keeping French men and women in the needle trades employed during the difficult German occupation. A final short conclusion reiterates Howell's claims for the usefulness of Picture Post as an archive of popular taste.

Howell's descriptions of the various articles on clothing and beauty that Picture Post ran between 1938 and 1945 show the potential of the magazine to serve as an important archive for historians of dress and fashion. The book has some issues, however. As already indicated, several of the chapters would have benefited from being more clearly integrated into the study. As well, a content analysis would have strengthened Howell's claim that this was an activist magazine, since the percentage of the magazine's content devoted to such subjects would be clear. Finally, and most crucially, the book would have benefited from being situated more firmly within a critical context. Howell tends to accept at face value the claims of the magazine's editors, writers, and photographers that they were determined to be truthful and to bring injustices to light. Such claims need to be interrogated much more critically than Howell has done in order to prove that the magazine is indeed as reliable an archive as she argues. Howell has done historians a service by sharing the riches of Picture Post, but further work needs to be done in order to appreciate this source's strengths and weaknesses.