Eleanor Reed’s study of Woman’s Weekly, a magazine that is an “icon of twentieth-century British domestic culture,” brings class and gender history together with literary and periodical scholarship to argue that the lower middle-class domestic culture it constructed was positive, aspirational, and self-aware (1). In doing so, Reed pushes back against pervasive and deeply negative assumptions about the lower middle class, namely, that it is characterized by its “acceptance of standardisation and authoritarianism, pretension, inauthenticity, and shame” (19). Reed does not, however, simply paint a rosy, redemptive picture of lower middle-class culture. Throughout Woman’s Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918–1958: Making Homemakers, she is attentive to the complexity, ambivalence, and contradiction found within the pages of this women’s magazine.

The study of twentieth-century women’s periodicals has been dominated by works that survey multiple publications. Woman’s Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918–1958: Making Homemakers is therefore distinctive as a book-length study of a single magazine over a relatively extended period of time. To manage the abundance of texts, Reed adapts the selective sampling methods seen in Cynthia White's Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (1970) and Susan Sheridan, with Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett, and Lydall Ryan, Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years (2002). Reed tracks Woman’s Weekly across a forty-year period by taking “soundings” every ten years, and throughout each year of the Second World War (9). Each chapter reports the result of a “sounding,” surveying the contents of the magazine during the year or years addressed. As is fitting for a survey of such a heterogeneous text as a women’s magazine, Reed tackles a variety of topics in each chapter.

The first chapter explores issues of Woman’s Weekly from November 1918 to November 1919, assessing the impact of the First World War on gender and the status of working women. Reed finds that, in contrast to much contemporaneous literature focusing on damaged masculinity, the romance fiction in Woman’s Weekly erased or downplayed veterans’ physical and psychological wounds, thus promising a swift return to normality. The first chapter also features a discussion of the magazine’s ambivalent response to leisure-class culture, a theme that recurs in subsequent chapters. In the second chapter, surveying magazines issued during 1928, Reed analyzes Woman’s Weekly’s near silence on current affairs, particularly women’s enfranchisement, as well as its celebratory attitude towards hands-on homemaking, including motherhood. In chapter 3, which surveys magazines issued between September 1938 to September 1939, Reed focuses how Woman’s Weekly dealt with Britain's preparations for conflict. She then moves to a discussion of how the magazine constructed middlebrow and suburban culture, showing how Woman’s Weekly was able to critique the very culture it helped to create. In chapter 4, Reed surveys Woman’s Weekly over the course of the Second World War, showing how the magazine guided its readers performing national service as well as exhorting wives and girlfriends to remain faithful to absent servicemen. Post-war austerity is the focus of chapter 5, in which Reed examines Woman’s Weekly over the course of 1948. Frustration with continued austerity put the publication's political neutrality under strain. Reed finds that the magazine's previous support for working women had also begun to unravel. In the final chapter, which surveys magazines issued during 1958, Reed shows how the magazine treated consumerism with ambivalence, and how it positioned itself as a mediator between mothers and teenage daughters in an attempt to court a new generation of readers.

As Reed follows many of the familiar beats of twentieth-century British history over these six chapters, she shows how Woman’s Weekly constructed a distinctively lower middle-class domestic culture for a mass readership of “socially ambitious women on low incomes” (232). Woman’s Weekly certainly encouraged its readers to desire and imitate certain aspects of leisure-class culture, but it also treated the leisure and consumerism with which it was associated with ambivalence. Reed shows how Woman’s Weekly constructed servantless domestic productivity, the making of handicrafts, and engagement with the arts in terms of moral quality as hallmarks of a lower middle-class identity that was to be aspired to and cultivated.

A study of a single publication could have become myopic, but Reed takes care throughout the book to set Woman’s Weekly in the wider literary landscape. Strategic comparisons with sister publications such as the working-class Peg’s Paper and My Weekly and the middle-class Good Housekeeping bolster Reed’s arguments that the domestic culture constructed in Woman’s Weekly is distinctively lower middle class. Reed also brings in contemporaneous novels, poetry and social commentary by authors including E.M. Delafield, Daphne Du Maurier, George Orwell and Marghanita Laski. In doing so, Reed argues for “the inclusion of domestic magazines within the wider field of literature” and yields some of her most vivid insights (8).

The sampling method Reed uses does occasionally impose frustrating artificial constraints. For example, Reed discusses in chapter 2 how the magazine encouraged sentimental motherhood in contrast to the emotionally distanced childrearing advocated by John B. Watson in his parenting manual Psychological Care of Infant and Child. But, as Reed acknowledges, Watson’s manual was published towards the end of 1928, the year sampled in the chapter. While the contrast between these two philosophies of childrearing and the class connotations attached to each remains striking, one cannot help but wish the sample was extended so as to gauge how the magazine responded to Watson’s book.

This is, however, a fairly minor issue with a methodology which has yielded major benefits. Over 570 Woman’s Weekly magazines were issued during the years sampled by Reed (9). This abundance of source material has been managed admirably by Reed to produce a book which roams over a wide range of topics and brims with fascinating detail. A variety of readers with interests in class, gender, and literary history will find something of interest in Woman's Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918–1958: Making Homemakers.