Staying at Home with the Weekly.

Susan Sheridan (with Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett and Lyndall Ryan), Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Years. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001.

Reviewed by Maryanne Dever.

Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Years is an important and valuable contribution to Australian social history, not least because it demonstrates so capably the continuing importance of sources such as women's magazines for those interested in charting changing ideals of womanhood and domestic culture in Australia. As Susan Sheridan indicates in her acknowledgments, this study has been some time in the making and one senses that the scope and shape of the project has shifted over time. Yet the end result is satisfying and intensely readable. It combines Sheridan's detailed analysis of the magazine with a series of interludes or 'memoirs' from Barbara Baird, Lyndall Ryan and Kate Borrett, each of whom was at different times involved in the project. An attractively packaged, large-format volume, Who Was That Woman? does not endeavour to provide a comprehensive publishing history of Australia's best known women's magazine; this was territory already covered to some extent in Denis O'Brien's celebratory work The Weekly (1982). Instead, this study situates itself comfortably between feminist media analysis and Australian social history, tracing the interdependencies of popular culture, femininity and consumption, in the period from 1946 to 1971. Rather than attempt exhaustive coverage, Sheridan and her co-researchers wisely opted for a 'slice approach', working from a detailed index of one year in every five for the period 1946 to 1971. This time span was selected for scrutiny not only because it coincided with the period of the Weekly's highest circulation and greatest impact, but also because it represented a time of enormous economic prosperity during which the magazine played a central role in the production of a new consumerist identity for Australian women.

Who was the ideal reader addressed by the Weekly in these decades, and how did she change over time? As the title suggests, the focus here is upon the role the Weekly played in the years following World War Two in forming Australian women's sense of themselves and in engaging women readers in both the pleasures and the work of consumption. Opening in 1946, the book charts the transition that Australian women were making away from the ingrained thrift of the war years when they were lauded for their capacity to save and to manage wisely, toward new identities based on spending and acquisition. The Weekly travelled with them on this journey, offering its female readers colourful scripts for achieving truly 'modern', heterosexual womanhood in the expanding world of the Australian suburbs. The woman reader addressed by the magazine was 'the housewife', and she was courted by the magazine's advertisers as the principal consumer on behalf of her household: she was a kind of 'Everywoman'. However, as Sheridan notes, although the model of femininity produced within the magazine 'presented itself as an ideal universally applicable to all women, it obscured major differences among them' (p.6). Indeed, the ideals of femininity and domesticity circulating in the magazine spoke principally to comfortable or aspiring white middle class readers; the existence of migrant women, Australian born working class women and Aboriginal women was only intermittently acknowledged in the pages of the magazine and they were seldom addressed as readers.

The core of Who Was That Woman? consists of chapters covering key facets of femininity and domesticity: the housewife as consumer; sex, romance and marriage; motherhood; women's paid and unpaid work; house and garden; food and cooking; health; and fashion and beauty. If the Weekly was - and remains - a socially conservative publication, it is evident that it did still move with the times (even if it was rarely ahead of them). Sheridan's detailed chapters carefully elaborate the successive discursive regimes that were employed across different decades to accommodate changing understandings of marriage, motherhood, and homemaking. Of particular interest is the Weekly's uneasy relationship to the notion of 'careers' for women and to the practice of married women undertaking paid work outside the home, two phenomena not readily reconciled with the magazine's promotion of domesticity and full-time motherhood as rightful and fulfilling feminine destinies. Sheridan traces the contradictions and anxieties surrounding these issues, and they are also taken up by Lyndall Ryan in her lively memoir section, 'Remembering the Australian Women's Weekly in the 1950s.' By the 1960s, the appearance of articles such as 'Meals Made in Minutes' showed growing recognition within the magazine that at least some readers were 'working wives' or 'two job mothers', as they termed them. Despite this, the Weekly's continuing dedication to particular models of domestic womanhood and family life in the face of the development of the Women's Liberation Movement and accompanying the rise in middle-class women's participation in paid employment, was apparently what contributed to its loss of influence in the 1970s.

There are genuine pleasures here for the contemporary reader seeking insights into the changing material conditions of Australian women's lives across these decades and into changing ideals of Australian womanhood. While labour-saving devices abound in advertisements, domestic life nevertheless remained labour intensive and standards of household management high. Highly-segregated gender roles in the post-war decades offered little possibility for the sharing of domestic chores. While references did appear in the magazine to a condition known simply as 'housewife blues', the dominant images are of ecstatic and glamourised engagements with an endless round of domestic tasks, all presented as pleasant duties rather than dull and repetitive burdens. In this era of fast food and domestic de-skilling, some younger readers might well marvel that anyone would want - let alone have been able - to crochet their own wedding dress (p.40) or produce an afternoon tea-cake in the shape of a vase of sweetpeas ('flower moulding in fondant is not as difficult as it may appear' p.93). More still might marvel that the ideal swimsuit model of the 1950s weighed in at 10 stone. The pleasures of reading this work are increased by the lavish level of illustration that provides readers unfamiliar with the magazine in this period ready access to key elements of the Weekly's visual presentation. I have no doubt that Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Years will become a valuable resource for researchers and students in history, cultural studies, media and women's studies. In its successful synthesis of contemporary feminist approaches to women's magazines it offers an excellent model for reading and writing social history through popular culture.

Maryanne Dever is Director of the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University. Her many publications include editing Wallflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia 1910-1945, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994.