How I Came to Write A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914

I never intended to be an academic. It is true that I had gained a place at Oxford in the late 1950s, arriving there, the product of a somewhat irregular education, to find myself outnumbered nine to one by male students. However, I was a 1950s girl. Though I graduated in 1961, we didn’t know yet that it was “the ’60s.” We didn’t know that our world was about to change. I thought I would be a school teacher, get married, have babies. And I did the first two fairly rapidly, marrying someone I had met at Oxford and teaching in a variety of secondary schools, following my husband around Britain as he undertook various courses and jobs. We moved to Manchester so that he could do postgraduate study, and I supported him financially until he got a post at Manchester University. When I became pregnant, I had to give up the teaching job I loved. No surprise there. Disapproval of working mothers was powerful, as I was to discover over the next few years, and discrimination against women was written into law. As a married woman, I still couldn’t rent a television in my own name, let alone sign any other kind of financial document, even though I was the wage earner. However, it was 1967. The ripples of what we called “Women’s Liberation,” which later came to be called “second-wave feminism,” were already being felt, though we did not know yet how this wave would sweep us up, tumble us about—women and men—and land us breathless far from where we started.

Where I landed—five years later—was in a just-launched interdisciplinary MA program on late Victorian and Edwardian society at Manchester University, which included literature, political theory, and social history. I had two lovely daughters and had worked part-time since the birth of my first child in formal and informal education: setting up and co-running a pre-school play group and teaching both adult evening classes and daytime classes for young women punch-card operators in an Oldham factory. I was involved in the women’s movement, the peace movement, and local politics. But I wanted to go back to studying. At Oxford, the English degree had included nothing of a later date than Tennyson’s “The Princess,” and the course was still shaped by Arnold’s ideal of the touchstone. However, I had always read the Victorians, and now I wanted a different kind of study. The MA was water to a thirsty woman. I loved it.

Two years later, I applied for and got a post in the English and History Department at Manchester Polytechnic. The polytechnics were run by the local authorities rather than the central government. We offered degrees but we were not a university. Compared with those at the “old University,” our students were more likely to be local, to have left school early, and to be less well-qualified, but they were eager to learn. My academic colleagues, too, were almost without exception able men who were the first in their families to get a BA, let alone the doctorates they had gained at universities in Britain and the United States. They were clever, argumentative, committed to their students, and perpetually at war with the hierarchy and sometimes with each other. I owe them much, especially Brian Maidment and Jeffrey Wainwright.

Scorned by the “proper University” “up the road,” we set about reinventing English studies. We read Raymond Williams, we argued about class, we taught courses with immodest titles like “Language, Society and Culture.” We not only read Mary Barton with our students (Gaskell was not highly rated in those days) but also gave them Engels, copies of popular street ballads (“Manchester’s Improving Daily”), and photocopies of the Poor Man’s Guardian and Penny Paper. Arnold turned in his grave. Of course we were not alone. We were part of a much wider movement where what is now called “cultural studies” was being invented...