Modernism/modernity

One of the nicest things said about us was that Women Folk is a household friend to all who read it, and not merely stiff black letterpress and cold white paper. If that be so—and it is grand to believe it—then please treat us as a friend loves to be treated; tell us of the things that matter to you. Bring us your news (just think of our Parliament always waiting for you!) and if it is joyful let us go shares, and if it is troublesome let us help to smooth away the wrinkles and turn out the bothersome invader.¹ I have been much interested in your paper so far, and more especially in the correspondence columns, because I must confess they have been so full of surprises for me.²

What are the forms of everyday life? In the correspondence columns of the feminist weekly, the Woman Worker, later named Women Folk, and in the avant-garde feminist publication the Freewoman, readers described the difficult interface of private life with the feminist issues of the day, so that the realities of housekeeping, marriage, childrearing, and work were made visible. Embedded as they are in the ephemeral and mundane aspects of daily life, these examples stand as emblems for the necessary connection between the three concerns of my study: domestic modernity, feminist periodical culture, and everyday life. Despite a great divide that loomed in the early twentieth century between feminist periodicals and more traditionally "feminine" women's papers and magazines, feminist papers often engaged the material of everyday life through forms usually associated [End Page 461] with women's print media: fashion pages, cooking columns, and letters pages that made room for confessional discourse. This essay is about one aspect of this rich literary culture, a "feminist complaint," or rather a series of complaints, found in the correspondence columns of two feminist periodicals of the early twentieth century circulating in Britain: the Woman Worker (1907-10) and the Freewoman (1911-12). The complaint—and modern feminist periodical culture in general—can tell us a great deal about the rhythms of everyday life and representations of women's labor in modern culture. It can also reveal the mechanisms of identification and dis-identification by which women connected themselves to the new feminist communities and identities of the early twentieth century.

The feminist complaint is only one of many ways in which feminist periodical culture imagined the everyday in the first decades of the twentieth century. A periodical makes meaning through its heterogeneity and offers its reader a number of avenues for engagement.³ This is no less true of feminist periodicals than of other journalistic forms. Editors could make use of a variety of strategies for engaging the everyday—editorials and features that commented upon and sought to revise the routines of daily life as well as "lighter" fare such as fashion columns and articles on homemaking that now seem surprising in the sometimes sober pages of feminist periodicals. These diverse means express a shared interest in the everyday that establishes deep connections between periodicals that have often been treated as representing separate political strategies and agendas. That is to say that the "feminist everyday" is a border-crosser, allowing us to find connections between various feminist publications, even when audience, tone and goals were largely different, as in the case of the socialist-feminist publication the Woman Worker and its avant-garde feminist contemporary the Freewoman.⁴ When we read for conversations about the everyday that exist in very different kinds of periodicals we are able to expose a large shared cultural project of developing new ways of reading modernity through a specifically feminist lens. In addition, the correspondence columns of these papers provide a vernacular form for expressing the concerns of daily life, that in its ephemerality draws our attention to the rhythms of everyday life: the rhythms of labor, domestic duties, childrearing, and more.

In the context of surrounding materials that make up the material culture of the feminist periodical—editorials, news...