Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

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. Highlysegregated
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.
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