If you have enjoyed engaging with our Britannia and Eve collection and are keen to explore the historical themes and issues that it raises in more detail, then we invite you to look at our extensive list of suggested further reading. This has been compiled by Ilya Parkins, Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of British Columbia. Ilya’s research interests include feminist theories; the history and theory of fashion; theories of modernity and early twentieth-century cultural formations; femininities; and periodical media. If you wish to pursue further research on any of these themes or, indeed, on publications such as Britannia and Eve and the history of women’s magazines more generally, Ilya’s suggested readings are an ideal place to start.
Adburgham, A. Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.
Aronson, A. Taking Liberties: Early American Women’s Magazines and Their Readers. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002.
R. Ballaster et al., ed. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity, and Women’s Magazines. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.
Beetham, M. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London: Routledge, 1996.
Beetham, M. “In Search of the Historical Reader: The Woman Reader, the Magazine and the Correspondence Column”. SPIEL 19, no. 1 (2000): 89–104.
Beetham, M. “Periodicals and the New Media: Women and Imagined Communities”. Women’s Studies International Forum 29, no. 3 (2006): 231–40.
Beetham. M. “Preface: The Role of Gender in Defining the “Women’s Magazine”’. In Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own?, edited by M. Hockx, J. Judge and B. Mittler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Carpenter, L. M. “From Girls into Women: Scripts for Sexuality and Romance in Seventeen Magazine, 1974–1994”. The Journal of Sex Research 35, no. 2 (1998): 158–168.
Clay, C. et al., ed. Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Forster, L., and J. Hollows, ed. Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s–2000s: The Postwar and Contemporary Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
Green, B. “The Feminist Periodical Press: Women, Periodical Studies and Modernity”, Literature Compass 6, no. 1 (2009): 191–205.
Green, B. Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Hackney, F. ‘“Women Are News”: British Women’s Magazines 1919–1939”. In Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, edited by A. Ardis and P. Collier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Hackney, F. Women’s Magazines and the Feminine Imagination: Opening Up a New World for Women in Interwar Britain. London: IB Tauris, 2014.
Haidarali, L. “Polishing Brown Diamonds: African American Women, Popular Magazines, and the Advent of Modeling in Early Postwar America”. Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 1 (2005): 10–37.
Kitch, C. The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
McCracken, E. Decoding Women’s Magazines: From Mademoiselle to MS. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.
Pass, V. “Racial Masquerades in the Magazines: Defining White Femininity Between the Wars”. Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 11, no. 2 (2020): 270–91.
Rabine, Leslie W. “A Woman’s Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism”. In On Fashion, edited by S. Benstock and S. Ferriss. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Ritchie, R., et al., ed. Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Rooks, N., V. Pass, and A. Weekley, ed. Women’s Magazines in Print and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Rooks, N. Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Scanlon, J. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Schrum, K. “‘Teens Means Business’: Teenage Girls’ Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944–1960”. In Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Cultures, edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Sheehan, E.M. “Now and Forever? Fashion Magazines and the Temporality of the Interwar Period”. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, edited by C. Clay et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Sheehan, E.M. “To Exist Serially: Black Radical Magazines and Beauty Culture, 1917-1919”. Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 30–52.
Tinkler, P. ‘“Are You Really Living? If Not, “Get With It!”: The Teenage Self and Lifestyle in Young Women’s Magazines, Britain 1957-70”. Cultural and Social History 11, no. 4 (2014): 597–619.
Walker, N.A. Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Walker, N.A., ed. Women’s Magazines 1940–1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.
Winship, Janice. Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora Press, 1987.
Wood, A. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines. Oxon: Routledge, 2020.