Time and Tide

Abstract

This book reconstructs the first two decades of the feminist magazine Time and Tide, founded in 1920 by Lady Margaret Rhondda and other women who had been involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Unique in establishing itself as the only female-run general-audience intellectual weekly in what press historians describe as the ‘golden age’ of the weekly review, Time and Tide both challenged persistent prejudices against women’s participation in public life and played an instrumental role in redefining women’s gender roles and identities in the interwar period. Drawing on extensive new archival research the book recovers the contributions to this magazine of both well- and lesser-known British women writers, editors, critics and journalists and explores a cultural dialogue about literature, politics and the arts that took place beyond the parameters of modernist ‘little magazines’. Offering insights into the history and workings of this periodical that no one has dealt with to date, the book makes a major contribution to the history of women’s writing and feminism in Britain between the two world wars. The book is organised chronologically in three parts, tracing Time and Tide’s evolution from its ‘Early Years’ as an overtly feminist magazine (1920-28), to its ‘Expansion’ and rebranding in the late 1920s as a more general-audience weekly review (1928-35), and, finally, to its ‘Reorientation’ in the mid-1930s in response to a world in crisis (1935-39).

Wyndham Lewis, Cicely Hamilton, and Nazi Germany in Time and Tide

“…However, it is telling of the wider societal prejudice against women engaging in political analysis (a prejudice which Clay shows was felt keenly by Lady Rhondda) that even a women-run periodical like Time and Tide chose to package Hamilton's astute political appraisals of Germany as travel writing. 77 At the same time, this packaging also shows that Time and Tide's engagement with international politics was by no means restricted to overtly political contributions.…”

“…This necessitated a strong marketing strategy, which included the courting of public controversy to expand Time and Tide's readership beyond a core feminist audience. 5 As part of this strategy, Time and Tide capitalized on the reputation of controversial figures like the artist, writer, critic and political polemicist Wyndham Lewis to stimulate debate and sales at the same time. Time and Tide published the first instalment of Lewis's notorious appraisal of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, "Hitlerism -Man and Doctrine," in January 1931 with the following disclaimer:…”

The ‘awkward’ squad: British women foreign correspondents during the interwar years

“…31 The novelist Winifred Holtby, who wrote widely on international affairs for the paper, and was one of its directors, struggled for both by-lines and acceptance from male contributors on these pages. 32 While the occasional woman had previously reported for mainstream newspapers from foreign parts, they were, for the most part, from wealthy and well-connected families, enjoying a degree of agency and access to elite networks few women did. The acclaimed nineteenth-century journalist Harriet Martineau's Letters from Ireland, published in 1852 in weekly articles in the Daily News are considered to be the first example of female foreign correspondence, although these articles were anonymous and written as from a masculine viewpoint.…”