'Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies' Website Launch

‘Journalism is the first draft of history’ is a maxim amongst journalists. But as networking, campaigning, and training organisation Women in Journalism points out on its website, that draft of history too often excludes female points of view.

Evidence shows that while some women are working at senior levels in broadcast journalism, newspapers are lagging behind, with just 25% of news stories on front pages of national newspapers in Britain written by women, and only eight national newspapers employing female editors.

Run from Nottingham Trent University by Dr Catherine Clay and Dr Eleanor Reed, ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ is a year-long project, publicising the ‘draft of history’ laid down by the influential and long-running feminist magazine Time and Tide. Founded in 1920 by Welsh businesswoman and feminist Lady Rhondda, this weekly review of politics and the arts was the only woman-controlled publication of its kind, competitive with the New Statesman. Time and Tide hosted contributions from many of the period’s leading political and literary figures, among them Vera Brittain, E. M. Delafield, Cicely Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, Rose Macaulay, George Bernard Shaw, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Ellen Wilkinson, and Virginia Woolf. During the interwar decades it was a beacon for feminism, a platform for women’s writing (both ‘high’ and ‘middlebrow’) and – as a leading ‘journal of opinion’ – offered perspectives on international as well as national politics from many of the most significant feminist thinkers and public intellectuals of the day.

Central to ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ is a dedicated website, timeandtidemagazine.org. Alongside information about the magazine’s history, this website’s star attraction is a free, downloadable Souvenir Edition of Time and Tide, edited by Dr Clay and produced by Nottingham-based publishers Five Leaves Publications. Showcasing selected articles from interwar issues of Time and Tide and replicating as closely as possible the layout and fonts used by the original magazine, the Souvenir Edition gives contemporary readers a taste of its interwar content. This includes a discussion of ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminism by Winifred Holtby, observations on Nazism by Cicely Hamilton, short stories by E. M. Delafield and Marghanita Laski, poetry by Naomi Mitchison and Eleanor Farjeon, reviews of books, theatre, music and film by some of Time and Tide’s regular staff writers (among them Christopher St. John, Sylvia Lynd, Mary Agnes Hamilton and Theodora Bosanquet)  and ‘Our Men’s Page’ – a glorious send-up of the ‘women’s pages’ that appeared in popular publications at the time.

This content sits alongside advertisements for corsets, dressmaking silk, and magazines targeting professional women and feminists, which together invoke the complex, multifaceted identities represented by what was (during its early years) the magazine’s predominantly female readership. In her brilliant Foreword to the Souvenir Edition, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee draws out the connections between past and present: ‘A hundred years ago might seem an age away, and yet here women’s writings leap fresh from these pages, their causes all too familiar today.’

Giving context to the Souvenir Edition, the website hosts a timeline charting Time and Tide’s interwar history, and biographies of some of the key figures who directed and/or edited the magazine: Lady Rhondda, Helen Archdale, Rebecca West, Cicely Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, E. M. Delafield, Theodora Bosanquet, and Professor Winifred Cullis. Both timeline and biographies are illustrated with artwork and other visual material from the period, including a wonderful photograph of Lady Rhondda marching alongside Emmeline Pankhurst at the Equal Rights Political Demonstration of 1926, and a Time and Tide Christmas card from the 1930s, showing the magazine’s offices in Bloomsbury. This visual content brings the magazine and its female producers vividly to life, and enriches our sense of the era in which it was produced.

Throughout 2020, the website will be updated regularly. New biographies will introduce more of Time and Tide’s key figures, and we will be inviting blog posts from trainee women journalists in response to the Souvenir Edition. These posts will offer fresh insights into the magazine from diverse perspectives, and explore its relevance today. The website will also host resources for teaching and research: these will include film footage, of speakers and panellists at a Festival of Women Writers and Journalists, to be held in London and/or online in November 2020. Other exciting content will include highlights from an Exhibition of Interwar Women’s Magazines, to be hosted by The Women’s Library at the London School of Economics between January and April 2021. Details of the Festival and Exhibition, and future planned events, will be available on the website.

Today, in a media industry that continues to value women’s appearance more highly than their opinions, Time and Tide’s marketing slogan – ‘Time and Tide tells us what women think and not what they wear’ – still resonates strongly. To discover what this fascinating magazine can teach us about our present as well as our past, visit timeandtidemagazine.org.

You can also follow ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ on Twitter: @timeandtidemag1

Dr Eleanor Reed is Project Officer for Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies. She is an early career researcher, specialising in early-mid twentieth-century domestic magazines. If you would like to find out about her research, you can read her chapter about ‘Lower-middle-class domestic leisure in Woman’s Weekly 1930’ in British Women’s Writing, 1930-1960: Between the Waves (edited by Jane Thomas and Sue Kennedy, Liverpool University Press). You can also find her on Twitter @ViolaChasm.

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