clearclassics: an early Irish women’s magazine.

The Lady of the House appeared in 1890 and while it was not the first Irish women’s magazine, it was probably the first to be widely distributed. Anybody who reads women’s magazines knows that they are significant advertising vehicles, and this particular magazine was actually produced by one of the first Irish advertising companies, Wilson Hartnell. Initially an occasional free-sheet sent out to selected readers by Findlaters’ grocers in Dublin, by 1893 it was appearing regularly and on sale in shops throughout the country, costing 1d (a penny). This would have placed it within the potential reach of women of all classes who could read, and literacy rates were soaring in these years.

As always with magazines, figuring out the target audience is a bit tricky. A sheet sent out by a grocery firm might have been read mainly by cooks and housekeepers in big houses, as well as by middle-class women of the house. The Lady of the House showcased the work of female artists like Mildred Butler and writers like H.M.Hutton, and it profiled women who were certainly not working-class, but the price of the magazine placed it within the reach of a very broad social span. (We should remember, however, that a penny was a significant sum, when a loaf of bread cost between 1d and 3d, and a good wage for a labouring man was £1 – or 240d – a week.) The cookery and housekeeping articles were aimed at the woman who did most or all of her own housework and had to make canny and thrifty decisions about what to buy and how to clean, cook and preserve. There were no references at all in this magazine either to servants, or to the ‘servant problem’ – a phrase used by the upper-middle classes to refer to the ‘difficulty’ of employing, training and keeping domestic servants. There were no nasty jokes about servant gormlessness or ‘stupidity’ either, unlike in Punch magazine and similar publications. This suggests that some servantless readers were envisaged, but also, some readers who were, or who had been, domestic servants themselves.

Women then, as now, liked to read about other, interesting women, people like Mrs Ernest Hart in February 1891 who was a doctor, trained in France (which trained women as doctors long before the UK did) running cottage industries for teenage girls in Donegal. There were some items on titled stallholders at charity bazaars – Galway’s Lady Sophia Grattan-Bellew and the Countess of Westmeath are mentioned in 1894. In June 1916, Countess Markievicz made the front page two months after she commanded a garrison during the Easter Rising. The Lady of the House was carefully neutral on politics, but a titled female rebel was irresistible. Looking through the magazine as a whole, though, it is clear that being rich and beautiful was not the only qualification for being the subject of an interview, photograph or opinion-piece. The women – sorry, ladies – featured always had to be doing something useful or creative too.

And it was more or less accepted by the magazine that many women had to work to support themselves; lady dentists, stockbrokers, bankers and even farmers were showcased occasionally. The more colourful and unusual the profession the better, and the rapidly-increasing numbers of women in teaching, nursing, shop work and office work featured only occasionally. Domestic servants, as mentioned already, never featured and female factory workers only when they and their families were the targets of philanthropic activities such as the item in June 1891 about the Dublin Country Air Association, which sent 1069 men, women and children on holidays to the seaside. It is easy to scorn this kind of activity now, though those of us inclined to sneer should reflect on what we have done recently to enable homeless, hotel and hostel-bound families to have some fun and fresh air.

Whenever I read newspapers or magazines I always turn first to the letters page, and then to the problem page (if there is one), and in this particular magazine, the readers’ forum was called The Women’s Parliament. It set out a topic for debate and solicited readers’ opinions on it. These readers came from Dublin, Derry, Donegal, Mayo, Kildare, Antrim, Westmeath, Carlow, Wexford, Tipperary and Waterford, and there was one from an Irish nurse in Glasgow. The June topic in 1898, for example, was on how best to help the poor; most readers agreed that the middle and upper classes had an inescapable responsibility, but that the poor should also be trained to help themselves. (No great controversy there.) There were other debates on marriage for women vs staying single (some readers favouring the latter state), paid work, the worth of voluntary activity – the ‘charity bazaar’ the magazine was so fond of was derided by many readers – and other subjects. The writers, some of whom gave their profession (at least one nurse, and a cook, wrote in) were articulate and passionate in their arguments. The fact that they used such a forum at all shows their self-confidence.

For the modern reader , the advertisments are as interesting as the editorial content, and many Dublin businesses and Irish manufacturers were featured – Cantrell & Cochrane Mineral Waters, Jacobs Biscuits, Bushmills Whiskey, Murphy & Orr linens. Some of these were based in what is now Northern Ireland and the reader is brought up short, realising that of course, at that time, this was all Ireland. Although the magazine (as said earlier) was neither nationalist nor unionist, it promoted Irish manufacture in the editorial as well as the advertising content. This was a tradition going back to the eighteenth century.

I love women’s magazines so much that I wrote a book about them ten years ago (see below), and what I love most about them – apart from the reader contributions – are the graphics, the how-to articles, the features on real people’s lives, and the advertising. Most of all, I am constantly seduced and baffled by the tension in editorial content between reassurance and vigilance. Readers are always being told how great they are, but also, how much more they need to do to make their lives better. Life in general (not just domestic life) is a project, but help is at hand. Life is a head-scratcher but there is always dry-scalp shampoo. But if readers are sometimes talked down to, they are also encouraged to talk back. Reader forums are a great untapped resource of social history.

Caitriona Clear, Women’s Voices in Ireland: women’s magazines in the 1950s and ’60s. (London: Bloomsbury 2016).

Hugh Oram, The Advertising Book: a history of advertising in Ireland (Dublin: MO books 1986).