Taking a leaf out of magazines for book

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy meets historian Caitriona Clear who looks at the empowerment of Irish women through the decades

The next time you finish reading your copy of Woman’s Way, Irish Tatler or U magazine and throw it in the recycling bin, bear in mind that one woman’s trash is another’s treasure.

Historian Caitriona Clear found lots of treasure when she was researching her latest book, Women’s Voices in Ireland; Women’s Magazines in the 1950s and 60s.

Caitriona, a senior lecturer in NUIG’s history department who has previously written on subjects from nuns to homelessness, says these magazines “offered a really good way into ordinary women’s heads and lives”, at a time when women’s voices weren’t often heard in broader media.

And while she adds that, “you had to be literate and confident to write in”, most of the correspondents to these magazines were regular women, albeit ones with strong opinions on the world.

The 1950s and 60s were a period of change in Ireland. Urban employment offered people new choices, while rural electrification and piped water improved life for countrywomen, heralding the arrival of electric cookers and washing machines.

The emigration which had blighted the 1950s was still prevalent but change was in the air, especially for women who were becoming more educated and outspoken. Change might have been slow, but it was happening and women’s magazines reflected this.

The most popular Irish magazine during the 1950s was Woman’s Life, which had been established in the mid-1930s. It had a problem page, but not one for letters. Most of its problem related to courtship with education also being an issue and marital problem featuring too.

Good advertising volume and plenty of news meant it was a thriving publication when it was taken over in 1959 by UK company Odhams, which published Woman’s Realm. But shortly afterwards, it disappeared and Caitriona can only surmise that Odhams bought it to close it.

Model Housekeeping ran from 1927-66 and was, she says, “beautiful”. In the 1950s and 60s, its articles on foreign holidays reflecting Irish people’s growing interest in travel.

The Irish Tatler and Sketch, meanwhile, was the magazine for the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy and Ireland’s new upper middle-classes. It subsequently evolved and is now Irish Tatler – an example of how magazines adapt to meet readers’ changing needs.

The magazine that became most influential in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s was Woman’s Way, founded in 1963. It was the first Irish magazine to have a letters page, and women took ownership of it.

“People were writing in letters saying “at last we have our own magazine’,” Caitriona says. And Woman’s Way penetrated parts of Ireland that other, older, magazines hadn’t reached, she adds.

That was partly because society was changing.

“There were more shops, more motorised transport and more money.”

Woman’s Way was based on English magazines such as Woman’s Own, Woman and Women’s Realm, and had features such as a letters page and a problem page.

“The problems were something else,” says Caitriona.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.