‘WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT – If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent Foods’: Time and Tide, Advertising, and the ‘Battle of the Brows’

Abstract

This essay examines both the advertising content and a discourse about commercial culture in the influential feminist weekly Time and Tide from 1920 to 1936. In particular it traces the ways in which this magazine re-worked the periodical codes as it moved from the ‘women's paper’ category to a more general-audience weekly review. A key stage in this transition was Time and Tide's ‘literary turn’ which placed the magazine at the heart of the ‘battle of the brows’ in the early 1930s. From its inception Time and Tide had played an important role in the reception and promotion of so-called ‘middlebrow’ women writers; later the magazine loosened its identification with the ‘feminine middlebrow’ in order to secure its position within the ‘high’ sphere of serious political journalism. Far from an abandonment of its female readership and early feminist identity, however, I argue that Time and Tide's re-branding was in concert with wider cultural shifts in the construction of women's gendered identities.